Captain Lavender
$9.95 – $15.95
The poems in Captain Lavender, the fourth collection by Belfast poet Medbh McGuckian, are located along a fault line where two surfaces badly meet; where what can be stopped or held or escaped grinds against what once could but can no longer. Water is the reigning metaphor: apt in its mutable demarcations, its squalls and shipwrecks.
That the poems in Captain Lavender are so insistently personal only makes them more convincingly political. The partitioning wall is “unusually high, / interwoven like the materials for a nest, / the airtight sensation of slates: / all as gracefully apart as a calvary from a crib.” There is nothing flippant nor trivial here. Lush with simile and sound (“I was born in little pieces, like specks of dust, / only an eye that looks in all directions can see me”), each poem is a sensuous gravure, a compelling portrait of the divided self, plangent echo of a country at civil war.
Description
The poems in Captain Lavender, the fourth collection by Belfast poet Medbh McGuckian, are located along a fault line where two surfaces badly meet; where what can be stopped or held or escaped grinds against what once could but can no longer. Water is the reigning metaphor: apt in its mutable demarcations, its squalls and shipwrecks.
That the poems in Captain Lavender are so insistently personal only makes them more convincingly political. The partitioning wall is “unusually high, / interwoven like the materials for a nest, / the airtight sensation of slates: / all as gracefully apart as a calvary from a crib.” There is nothing flippant nor trivial here. Lush with simile and sound (“I was born in little pieces, like specks of dust, / only an eye that looks in all directions can see me”), each poem is a sensuous gravure, a compelling portrait of the divided self, plangent echo of a country at civil war.
Additional information
| Publication date: | 1995 |
|---|---|
| Pages: | 83 |
| Binding: |
