Medbh McGuckian

MMG , who lives in Northern Ireland, is well-regarded among contemporary poets writing in English. She began by writing a very private and reserved poetry. Using images from the home and from nature, she explored the female body and the female psyche, and strove to access the intimacy of a woman's spirit through the concrete aspects of a woman's life: I believe wholly in the beauty and power of language, the music of words, the intensity of images to shadow-paint the inner life of the soul.
Contemporary Authors. Gale Research.
143
She was compared by critics to Marianne Moore , Elizabeth Bishop , and Emily Dickinson . In the course of her career a strong strain of the political emerged among her personal topics, and she has become both historian of and elegist for Ireland's violent story. She has published poetry in volumes and in periodicals, as well as broadsides and essays.

Milestones

12 August 1950

Medbh McCaughan (later MMG ) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Contemporary Authors. Gale Research.
143

1982

MMG published her award-winning first full-length volume collection of poetry, The Flower Master, with Oxford University Press .
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research.
352

11 November 1993

MMG published an extensively revised edition of her first poetry collection with her Irish publisher, Gallery Press , as The Flower Master, and Other Poems.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
Poetry Criticism. Gale Research.
27: 95-6

Biography

Birth and Family

12 August 1950

Medbh McCaughan (later MMG ) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Contemporary Authors. Gale Research.
143