'on Her Second Birthday', Medbh Mcguckian (Critical Essay‪)‬

Medbh McGuckian's beautiful poetry has many fine readers, but the presence of maternal jouissance in her earlier writing often produced accusations of wilful obscurity, or glowing critiques that nonetheless have circled around the averred unknowability of her work. Multiple vertices of being, with competing energies and impulses, produce a powerful affect that is commonly understood by critics as fostering impenetrability as an end in itself. Even many of her most admiring critics seem resigned that mystification, evasiveness, and converse currents are part of the poetry's magic, but not its meaning. The poet-critic, Justin Quinn, who has himself advanced convincing arguments about the relevance of McGuckian's work, has noted that, 'two generations of critics have been baffled by her poetry and are uncertain of its subject on a simple denotative level'. (1) At least one reader who has resisted the temptation to mystify McGuckian's poetry is the critic, Guinn Batten, who remains one of her most incisive commentators. Writing about McGuckian's, 'On her Second Birthday', Batten reads the poem as written in the voice of the daughter and argues that it complicates the use of woman as a cipher for nation and spirit though a process of embodiment, when 'figuration [...] becomes matter or body.' (2) Choosing 'On Her Second Birthday', as a poem that literally 'matters', I take my cue from some of Batten's more tantalizing observations and consider the possibility of a lyrical T in which voice proceeds from both mother and daughter in concord and contrapuntal cleavage at a time that Batten suggests seems to 'precede bodily birth'. (3) Julia Kristeva's proposal that 'if pregnancy is a threshold between nature and culture, then maternity is a bridge between singularity and ethics', (4) opens up the possibility of thinking through a dyadic prism about the co-being of mother and child in this poem as they share the mother's body and the psychic horizon of poetry. 'On Her Second Birthday' is a poem about pregnancy and maternity, itself a nexus between body and word, between the illusory, unified speaking subject and the dispersal of intersubjectivity. It layers diachronies of emergence and differencing, interleaving plots of prenatal encounter, peri-natal separation, and linguistic subjectivization. It inscribes the mother's/speaker's relationship with her daughter during pregnancy (as one-yet-two), their physical separation at the daughter's birth, and their psychic separation as the daughter emerges into language around the time of her second birthday. The opening lines of the poem set the scene for the reader's slippage between the double perspective of child and mother: 'In the beginning I was no more/Than a rising and falling mist/You could see though without seeing'. (5) The mother/speaker is the incubating/mediating /poetic frame who represents the world to, and negotiates the world for, the reader/child, and equally, the child/speaker begins life as a projection of the mother's own dreams and is the mist through which the mother's desire can be reached rather than seen for herself. The enunciatory line, 'In the beginning I was no more' echoes the opening of St John's Gospel, 'in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'. (6) Displacing a single point of linguistic incarnation, it establishes several beginnings along the double but different journeys into and away from two-ness and one and another. The words 'no more', act like a hinge describing the child's death to aquatic life, the mother's death to her previous self, while the enjambment, 'no more/ than', swings the reader onto another psychic plane, representing the state of not being 'more/than' one before pregnancy for the mother; and 'no more/than' one for the newborn: 'Seeking to be born/Carried off half/Of what I was able to say'.