Blaris Moor

The title of Medbh McGuckian’s newest volume, Blaris Moor, refers to a traditional ballad that commemorates the trial and execution in 1797 of four militia men condemned by the authorities as members of the United Irishmen. The United Irishmen were so named because their failed Rebellion of 1798—among the worst bloodshed Ireland has ever known—was meant to unite Protestants and Catholics. Always steeped in sensual longing, McGuckian’s poems are historically complex invocations of such volatile landscapes, shedding light on the workings of the private world behind the public conflict. The volume then moves to other scenes of similar contest, including meditations on the Flight of the Earls in the early 1600s and considerations of the two World Wars. The poems here are conversations full of the strained atmosphere of those times in history, much like the present, when forces for good and ill are poised in delicate balance: This half-peace war is here showing its peaceful face. It has its front line of souls hovering at knee-height in the indistinct dawn, only two-thirds divine, crozier-shaped wind heads. from "The Barns of Joseph"

Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950, where she now lives with her husband and four children. She received both a BA and MA from Queen’s University, where, alongside Paul Muldoon, she studied under Seamus Heaney. In 1985, she returned to Queen’s as the university’s first female writer-in-residence. She has also held residencies at the University of Ulster and Trinity College, Dublin, as well as universities in America. Medbh McGuckian published her first two chapbooks in 1980 before her first full-length collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. Wake Forest University Press has published eleven books by McGuckian, beginning with On Ballycastle Beach (1988), which won the Cheltenham Award. Her other awards include the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, the Denis Devlin Award, the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award, and the 2002 Forward Prize for Best Poem, honoring “She Is in the Past, She Has this Grace.” With Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Medbh McGuckian co-translated Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (2000); she is also the author of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999) and is the editor of an anthology of younger Northern Irish poets, The Big Striped Umbrella (1985).