'Things of the Same Kind That Are Separated Only by Time': Reading the Notebooks of Medbh Mcguckian (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the Medbh McGuckian archive at Emory University, fifty-four notebooks form their own subseries within the forty-two linear feet that house eighty-seven boxes of her collection. Although many of the notebooks are of a similar type--about the size and shape of a trade paperback, staple bound, with approximately 250 lined pages each-there are also much smaller, novelty books, suggesting that McGuckian always has a notebook at hand. All of them are completely filled, margin to margin, with her cursive script. The entries are undated, though changes in pen colour and type (1) as well as occasional horizontal lines across the page may indicate various sittings. Eighteen folders each contain a single notebook already identified as containing early drafts of poems from a particular published book; (2) the ten folders at the end of the subseries, however, contain multiple notebooks with 'fragments of poetry' (3) not yet identified or linked to a publication. Indeed the density of handwriting within each notebook seems a conscious effort on McGuckian's part to obscure her notebooks' contents. In his 2006 book Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry, Shane Alcobia-Murphy first revealed McGuckian's poetic as one in which she 'borrow[s] wholesale' (4) from the texts she reads, rearranging selected lines from the source texts to create a completely new literary entity. He mentions 'word lists and early drafts in her notebooks and unbound word-sheets' specifically as evidence for his argument that 'the collections of words result from her reading of diverse texts', (5) but there is no evidence in Sympathetic Ink that he has actually analyzed the notebooks themselves. Aware of the unidentified contents of the notebooks as well as Alcobia-Murphy's suggestion of their potential, I began with the initial one in the first unidentified folder, transcribing the opening fifty pages as a representative sample of the whole. (6) What came to the surface among seemingly random words and phrases were scattered fragments of two poems, 'Balakhana' and 'Yeastlight', published in On Ballycastle Beach (1988). How this correlation situates the notebook in time is not immediately evident; though it must have preceded the volume, it may have been by a relatively long or short time. (7) What can be said with certainty is that the contents of this sample represent the shadow behind these two poems, preceding even their most nascent form as manuscript drafts. Each line from the poems also found in the notebook is informed both by the notations that surround it and its source text. Re-placing source text and notebook in dialogue with 'Balakhana' and 'Yeastlight' opens the poems up to new readings that challenge the largely gendered critical reception of On Ballycastle Beach, (8) making apparent their defiant vision forged by the political terror of Stalinist Russia and, by analogy, of Troubles Belfast.