The Book of the Angel - Hardcover

McGuckian, Medbh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1930630174 ISBN 13: 9781930630178

Publisher: Wake Forest University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Medbh McGuckian’s subject in The Book of the Angel is religious, but it is never conventional. The title is derived from the Liber Angeli, a Latin document of Early Christian Ireland in which Saint Patrick, speaking with an angel, is granted the ecclesiastical see of Armagh. The images are drawn from Mediaeval and Renaissance art and are as driven by the irreconcilable mysteries of Christ’s Passion and Incarnation, by the sacred and profane, as was the work of the old masters. The poet’s landscapes are tangible, painterly, moving from the angels of Ireland to those of Los Angeles and Hollywood and toward unreality in the Baroque tradition of trompe l’oeil. McGuckian’s poems remind one how different poetry is from prose; why it is a sister art of music and painting.

About this title

About the Author

Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950, where she now lives with her husband and four children. She received both a BA and MA from Queen’s University, where, alongside Paul Muldoon, she studied under Seamus Heaney. In 1985, she returned to Queen’s as the university’s first female writer-in-residence. She has also held residencies at the University of Ulster and Trinity College, Dublin, as well as universities in America. Medbh McGuckian published her first two chapbooks in 1980 before her first full-length collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. Wake Forest University Press has published eleven books by McGuckian, beginning with On Ballycastle Beach (1988), which won the Cheltenham Award. Her other awards include the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, the Denis Devlin Award, the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award, and the 2002 Forward Prize for Best Poem, honoring She Is in the Past, She Has this Grace.” With Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian co-translated Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (2000); she is also the author of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999) and is the editor of an anthology of younger Northern Irish poets, The Big Striped Umbrella (1985).

Review

An exquisite book, whose difficult beauties demand patient re-reading... Like her countryman, Seamus Heaney, McGuckian writes with a highly compressed, crystalline diction, and in a species of English that reverberates with history and myth. It makes an eerie and most captivating sound indeed in American ears. --Cold Mountain Review

Here, McGuckian breaks the conventions of lyric poems, imagining them as numinous spiritual confessions... Like a medieval painting whose archaic symbolism is lost on modern viewers, the beauty of McGuckian's work proves ravishing, uncanny. --Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle

Edition details

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1930630174
• ISBN 13: 9781930630178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 87