Interns’ Corner: So Many New Reviews!!

Here at the press, we’re really ecstatic about the multitude of reviews our poets have been featured in recently. As if Harry Clifton’s review of last week’s featured poet, Thomas Kinsella, wasn’t coincidental enough, this afternoon, we received our issue Boston College’s Irish Literary Supplement and found a few more surprises. Not only did the supplement include a new review of Michael Longley’s A Hundred Doors, but once again, this week’s featured poet, Medbh McGuckian, has received some press as well. Today, Kelly and I had a lot of fun reading Heather Bryant Jordan’s review of My Love has Fared Inland. On the whole, it was interesting to find that Jordan had noticed several things when reading McGuckian that us interns have experienced as well. For Jordan, it seems as though

McGuckian explores the dynamic tension between writing and being, between pen and hand, alphabet and page … McGuckian’s poetic universe is a place where the elasticity of language leaps between the natural and the human world; it interweaves the two until it is difficult to know where one element begins and another ends.

For Kelly and me, Jordan’s observations reminded us of a piece of advice that our boss jokingly likes to bestow upon any new intern who is reading McGuckian for the very first time: “Sometimes with Medbh, you’ve just got to grab hold of an image, and then, hang on for dear life to see where it’s going to take you.” All jokes aside, over the past couple of weeks, it has been really neat to see others in our community recognize some of the same gifts in these poets that we’ve seen all along. With two of our featured poets getting extra attention for two weeks in a row now, it’s sometimes fun to think that our own little blog might be starting to pick up on some pretty big trends.

To read more about what was said in these reviews, be sure to check in with us next week as we start to dive a little deeper into these critics thoughts and share a couple of our own.