The poetry of Medbh McGuckian has by no means received universal critical acclaim and many of her reviewers have been notoriously acerbic and personal in their attacks. Patrick Williams classifies her work as ‘colourful guff’: ‘McGuckian's concoctions of endless poeticism are non-visionary, and the funny, sealed little worlds where harmless cranks parley with themselves in gobbledegook won't impinge on the real world of loot and dragons.’ Such criticism of her work's supposedly vexatious obliquity is not unusual: she is labelled fey and mannered, whimsical, at best intricate and enigmatic, at worst inaccessible and subjective. Gerald Dawe complains that much of her imagery is ‘imprecise to a fault and, like candy floss, rather bland a second time round’; Mary O'Donnell believes that her ‘literary “autism”’ is an Art for Art's sake; and Andrew Elliott is tempted to view her poetry as ‘the powerfully rehabilitated feminine icon co-opted by the morality of monetarism into a meaningless “folly-studded” aesthetic’. Behind the indignation of these critics lie three essential objections: first, that her work is deliberately obfuscatory; secondly, that she has imperfectly absorbed the influence of both literary peers and precursors; and thirdly, that her poems lack coherent subject matter. All three are reductive misreadings of McGuckian's oeuvre. This chapter offers a corrective account by redirecting critical atttention towards her peculiar method of composition, focusing especially on her hitherto unnoticed strategies of quotation.

There is some truth, however, in the accusation that her work ‘hoards knowledge that belongs exclusively to the poet's private life’. Indeed, McGuckian admits as much in her interview with Kathleen McCracken when, describing her poems, she states ‘I'm not sure they don't remain private, at least until some scholar totally identifies with me. When I read one, I know who it is for, what I felt, what they felt. […] But there's usually one special person the poem is a private message to.’