The Book of the Angel

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).

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.