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

While gaps remain in H.D. studies, especially considering the huge critical industries surrounding some of her male contemporaries, H.D.'s poetry has received much more extensive treatment than McGuckian's. This essay, therefore, grants more acreage to the politics of McGuckian's garden. I also devote substantial attention to McGuckian's prose writings and interviews, some of them scattered through publications with limited circulation in the United States. In these interviews and at readings, she discusses her process and intentions with exceptional candor and provides important contexts for the poems. However, this essay also focuses on a specific maternal urgency in Sea Garden that the poems encode as spiritual and creative frustration. Both artistic growth and motherhood, according to H.D., require an inspiring blast of sea wind--or resuscitation of the stillborn daughter who never breathed.

From flower to master

As is the case for many contemporary poets, pamphlets and contest recognition preceded McGuckian's first book contract, in 1982, with Oxford for The Flower Master. (6) Venus and the Rain (1984) and On Ballycastle Beach (1988) also appeared with Oxford, but with Marconi's Cottage (1991) she switched to the Gallery Press of Ireland. The Flower Master and Other Poems, a heavily revised new edition, appeared from Gallery in 1993.

In the TLS review of the 1993 edition, Steven Matthews praises the new version as "a much tighter, more concentrated book," more closely focused on floral imagery. Matthews notes that 12 poems were dropped, others repositioned, and 17 poems added, an expansion that "sharpens the book's range of tones and adds a welcome note of skepticism towards its presiding theme," rendering the book more "alert to the dangers of self-regard in any mastery of image and form." Clair Wills, too, finds the revised edition "chart[ing] even more clearly the development" from adolescence to mature womanhood ("Medbh McGuckian" 281). However, much scholarly commentary on The Flower Master predates the revisions, and in subsequent pieces McGuckian's critics do not sufficiently distinguish the versions or acknowledge the radical nature of the changes. McGuckian, after all, cut more than a quarter of the first volume, renamed one poem and amended its last line, shifted three short pieces into sequences, and added substantial new material. She also reorganized the lyrics, altered the dedication, and replaced the cover illustration.

Both incarnations of The Flower Master begin with poems of adolescence, but by deleting some poems, importing new ones, and rearranging others, McGuckian emphasizes the seasonal and floral motifs, accents the mixture of sexuality and violence that pervades the volume, and peoples the sequence more vividly with a range of female characters. For example, "Faith," "Spring," "The 'Singer,'" "Aunts," and "My Mother," all new poems appearing in the first dozen pages of the Gallery edition, present sisters, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers, joining women-centered poems already included in the first collection, such as "Slips" and "To My Grandmother." In interviews, McGuckian often describes this book's structural focus on marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth; the revisions also clarify this narrative, especially in "Lucina." This sequence begins with seeds, progresses through a "fattening moon" and "pica" (the mineral cravings of some pregnant women), and later evokes cervical dilation and birth. "The Moon Pond," which appeared in the 1982 book, assumes a new position at the end of "Lucina," making clearer sense of its "milk-fevered lady" and the bold birds ready to mate again.