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

Paradoxically, then, the liberating winds of Sea Garden suggest the failure of maternity and a potentially fruitful future. Throughout most of the volume, as in "Sheltered Garden," "fruit cannot drop/through this thick air" (25); neither poems nor children can thrive in the tame environs of Victorian culture. She therefore petitions a sea wind to create a harsher and wilder, seemingly unmaternal climate. However, H.D. can only imagine successful fruition of motherhood or poetry in such a radically changed, storm-blasted world. While her first collection does not develop a clear vision of how successful maternity and poetic creativity might coexist, her metaphors insist that they require the same conditions.

In contrast, the title poem of The Flower Master embraces a sheltered space, suggesting different attitudes toward poetry and womanhood. The first-person plural speaker obediently engages in her lessons: "we come to terms with shade, with the principle / of enfolding space." In fact, the immediate "master" of the poem seems to be not Baudelaire, as Docherty suggests, but a teacher of ikebana, instilling the principles of Japanese floral arrangement. (Porter also, although very briefly, notes "references to Japanese arts and custom" in this lyric [92].) Stella Coe, in her study of ikebana, uses the term "flower master" itself to refer to an expert in this discipline (22), and McGuckian's references to the Japanese festival of moon viewing and to the tea ceremony confirm the allusion. The flower master's students learn how to bend seasonally appropriate plants into designs and create the symbolic correspondences that this art often suggests. This strategy of bending rather than cutting also suggests an immediate contrast to H.D.'s rough handling, and the pliant strength of boughs manipulated for these arrangements evokes the similarly passive virtues of McGuckian's gladiolus.

The meditative function of ikebana, in fact, illuminates the entire collection. Directing would-be practitioners, Coe writes, "the way to proceed is to let your insight guide you. You want a direct, non-analytic expression of the theme in the simplest terms possible" (129). McGuckian herself and several critics have characterized her strategies in similar terms. Sirr, for instance, describes her evasions of rational discourse: "the images are not there to elucidate but to detonate and resonate in all their weird energy" (461). Elmer Andrews analyzes the "pull between logic and illogicality" (135) in her work, and Mary O'Connor sees McGuckian's "flight to the semiotic" (155) as a response to the pressures of living in Northern Ireland. In "Surfacing" McGuckian professes, "Poetry is my way of getting drunk" (105), calls the poetic process "vatic" (106), and describes her poems as patterns meant to express "my inability to speak.... I want to make English sound like a foreign language to itself" (105). Her works rarely present clear situations, coherent speakers, or consistent narratives; their purposes remain oblique, so that the poems serve as tokonamas enshrining their evocatively arranged sprays.