The Centre College English program will present a free poetry reading by one of Ireland's leading poets, Medbh McGuckian, 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Norton Center Board Room on campus.
Born in Belfast in 1950, McGuckian is linked with the generation of Northern Irish poets who followed in the wake of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet. McGuckian, in fact, studied with Heaney at Queen's College in Belfast, where now she teaches.
McGuckian's poems can be described as intensely personal, often focusing on femininity, motherhood and family relationships.
"Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20-century Ireland," Heaney says.
Noted for what one critic has called the "hypnotic oddness" of her verse, McGuckian herself says, "My words are traps through which you pick your way."
