Forging Intertextual Encounters with Death: Medbh McGuckian’s The High Caul Cap

When constructing each of her poems, the contemporary Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian selects, modifies, and juxtaposes extracts from other (often unacknowledged) texts. "I like to find a word living in a context," she has stated, "and then pull it out of its context. It's like they are growing in a garden and I pull them out of the garden and put them into my garden, and yet I hope they take with them some of their original soil, wherever I got them."1 In a sense, this is a much a matter of "graft" as of "craft": what is taken from the quoted text takes root and grows in the quoting text. Her appropriative methodology allows her not only to inscribe within her own poems the psychodramas of female literary authorship, and thus learn from the experiences of her foremothers on how to circumvent patriarchal power, but also to write from an enabling distance about the conflict in Northern Ireland.2