The Unfixed Horizon

The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems traces Medbh McGuckian’s remarkable trajectory through fourteen volumes published between 1982 and 2013, amply displaying her bewitching, opulent imagination. A comprehensive introduction by editors Borbála Faragó and Michaela Schrage-Früh offers a valuable overview and rare insight into the work and the myriad influences—both private and public—of this mysterious poet. Their selection perceptively charts the history through which the poet has lived.

McGuckian’s early poems, the editors point out, view Belfast’s sectarian violence through the lens of the female body and domestic imagery, while her political engagement later becomes more direct. McGuckian’s poems are “firmly rooted in Northern Irish soil,” yet encompass a world of interests erotic and maternal, spiritual and sensuous, private and political. Readers open to her enigmatic syntactical structures, wide-angled metaphors, and metamorphic images multiplying in dream-like fashion will be richly rewarded.