The High Caul Cap

Medbh McGuckian

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781943666126
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The High Caul Cap is both the name of a traditional Irish air and a symbol for the link remaining after birth between mother and child. The caul was superstitiously regarded as a good omen and so kept at the hearth as a preservative against drowning. This symbolic gesture helps us to fathom the watery imagery in this volume, which traces the decline and death of the poet's mother. Medbh McGuckian's writing is always profoundly sensual, but now, with the maternal body at stake in its meditations, the physical takes on supernatural powers. Poetry relies on the senses for proof, much as the doubter relies on touch to be convinced of the miraculous. Mother-daughter relationships move down the generations ("I discover a photograph / of my beautiful sculpted daughter" from "Corner of Field with Farm") trying to establish the exact nature of their love. As in many of McGuckian's books, blue is a sacred color (of the Madonna, the sea, the sky) and saints and angels appear throughout the volume as though to remind us of how the masters used such icons to transform their myths into art. McGuckian uses these icons to grieve for, interrogate, and transform into poetry her late mother's "tangible gaze."

Table of contents

• Kaluza’s Law
• These Latinized Snows
• Research into Haloes
• Woman Examining Her Breasts in a Mirror
• The Nth of Marchember
• The Museum of Touch
• Cousin Alice
• A Supplement to the Withering
• Corner of Field with Farm
• Broken Pot Used as Writing Material
• Woman Kept in a Casket
• Maroon-backed Ledger
• Her Everyday Comportment
• The Seven Times Mother
• She Wears the Sky
• Goddess of the Candlelight during Childbirth
• The Mirroring Mother
• Willowware Cup
• Sweet Dream Just Before Christmas
• Sandpaper Letters
• The Meaning of Margaret’s Hands
• Seated Woman
• The Mercyseat
• The Spirit of the Mother
• The High Caul Cap
• Sunburst in E Major
• The Vine Forestlight
• Rose Inhabited by a Bee
• Master of the Female Half-lengths
• The Doll Funeral
• A Death Horoscope
• Gold Star Mother
• The Plumose Anemone
• Operation Spring Wind
• The Honey Vision
• Ascent to Perception Temple
• The Wearing of Brooches
• The Mules that Angels Ride
• The Skull Nest
• Sung Death
• The Ocean River
• The Light Called Opalescence
• Notebook of Sleeps
• Sibyl with Guitar
• M and a Half Street
• Buttermilk Shade
• The Blood Trolley
• Receiving Non-rebirth
• The Flower of the Moment of What Comes Easily