Both flower and flower gatherer: Medbh McGuckian's The Flower Master and H.D.'s Sea Garden

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Lesley Wheeler

Even so, the very allusions in "The Flower Master" to ikebana intersect with literary modernism. McGuckian's speaker studies under "the school of the grass moon," a translation of Sogetsu-ryu. Although ikebana originated as a masculine discipline performed by priests, noblemen, and warriors, recent centuries democratized the pursuit and created new versions (Coe 22-23). Sogetsu, founded in the 1920s, "has a wide following both in and outside Japan, possibly because it is the most easily translated into the language of other cultures." It emphasizes individuality and originality in creating arrangements; its founder, Sofu Teshigahara, has been called "the Picasso of ikebana" (Coe 23). Thus Sogestu's movement coincides roughly with imagism, the modernist movement arising in part from H.D.'s early poems. McGuckian's interest in ikebana, moreover, echoes some modernists' preoccupation with the Orient.

Though it embraces rather than rejects bowers, "The Flower Master" does share some qualities and images with "Sheltered Garden," just as the larger volumes correspond in certain points. These correspondences, further, suggest where McGuckian's view of womanhood overlaps with H.D.'s: each poet, in particular, celebrates female sexual appetite. Both "The Flower Master" and "Sheltered Garden" eroticize their landscapes; the students in the contemporary poem, for instance, "stroke gently the necks of daffodils/and make them throw their heads back to the sun," and collect plants with suggestive names like "sweet/sultan, dainty nipplewort." McGuckian's "sea-fans with sea-lavender" invoke H.D.'s many sea flowers, and both poems suggest an autumnal mood, H.D. through ripening fruit and McGuckian through the mid-September festival of moon viewing. These similarities, however, frame the essentially contrary stands the poems adopt. Placing her "scissors in brocade," eschewing the wild, invigorating breakage H.D. imagines, McGuckian's speaker espouses gentleness and tradition. Even the form of "The Flower Master" resists its predecessor's. McGuckian avoids symmetry and creates a tripartite arrangement in loyalty to ikebana's aesthetics (these Japanese arrangements consist of three main lines), but she also returns to meters the imagists eschewed (Coe 43). "The Flower Master" adheres to a rough pentameter, irregularly rhymed, while "Sea Garden" depends for its rebellious music on jaggedly uneven lines and verses.

Whenever McGuckian herself describes poems in The Flower Master, she emphasizes their preoccupation with sexuality, pregnancy, and childbirth. In "My Words Are Traps" she emphasizes the book's focus on "the cruelty of birth" (117) and refers to death itself as "the flowermaster" (119), adding still another layer to that title image. In a 1996 essay, "Drawing Ballerinas," she links the private violence of such experience with the political violence of the Irish Troubles that has also shaped her life (196-97). In a letter, she drives home just how immediately she treats the particulars of parturition: