Blaris Moor

Medbh McGuckian

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780916390990
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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"

Table of contents

• Cover
• Beginning
• An Early Apocalypse
• The Reading Fever
• The Nymph Hay
• The Stone-word
• Trans-shipment Station
• Musk
• Animals of the Mind
• The Contents of the Cupboard
• Tavoletta
• The Rainbow Division
• How Despair May Be Transformed into a Diamond
• The Migration of the Nobles, 1603
• By the Entrails of Christ
• Virginia Will Become Aughanure
• Primrose Red Orchestra
• Santo Spirito Lands on Mars
• White Cortina Outside Stardust Ballroom
• The Statement of My Right Honourable Friend
• The Questioning of Soldier L
• Note for Blind Therapists
• A Novel About Patrick
• Reading Before Stalin
• Verses Unpublished in the Poet’s Lifetime
• Attempt at a Room
• Her Dislove of Love
• The Heart Ghost
• Days in Red Poland
• So Warsaw’s Come to Wait on Us Now
• Antipersonnel Mine
• Skirt of a Thousand Triangles
• Notice
• District Behind the Lines
• Black Re-partition
• Rowe’s Fawn
• Honeycross
• At the Hand and Pen
• Telltale
• The Makeover
• My Angelism
• The Barns of Joseph
• The Goddess of Smallpox
• House Private
• After Afterlude
• Butterfly Memory Object
• Black Stone Mantelpiece with Chimney Clock
• The Chess Queen
• Who Is Your City?