The 57th review 50th BOOK "Medbh McGuckian’s The High Caul Cap"

This book is very good, this book has an amazing story that can interest the reader. And I have read this book more than once. You should read this book! By Rifaldi Fauzan

With its talismanic title, the latest collection by Belfast poetess Medbh McGuckian, The High Caul Cap, sets in motion a flurry of gestures. The “caul,” An cul in the Gaelic, refers to an amniotic sack, once thought to be a lucky charm for sailors against drowning out at sea, while in Gaelic and Celtic musical traditions it refers to a score performed by various folk musicians. These give rise to McGuckian’s slow, elegaic dance of words and images. Words and phrases in McGuckian disclose a sense of morose but delectable air.

McGuckain’s involuted style of writing, while occasionally troublesome, does have its merits. Symbols begin to gather meaning through rereadings and a constant tweaking of the inward voice of the meticulous reader. The fifty-four poems here embark on a slow dance with “These Latinized Snows,” a poem that behaves as “a preface/to an experience” (11) dedicated to a vivacious woman—McGuckian’s late mother. The intense unreadability of the poems are testament to “the messy street debris” or the “stretch marks on the trunk of an aspen” (11), which the poetess gathers for “the dance” and which the subject of the poem, “the woman” or “eva,” “is about to break into” (11). The unreadable snow, a prayer-like snow, “like a far grander blanket,” is the composition to which her dance is imminent (11). She constantly reiterates images of light and the grave, as if pointing to the inconceivable unreadability of death itself. Craft, to McGuckian, encompasses concealment and exploration, as well as agitation and repose.

In “The Nth of Marchember,” we see an obsession with infinity in the “seemingly borderless surround” (14). The “she” is an “angel and puppet coming together” in her everlasting absence, “outside, overflying a snowy/border” (14). An imagery of cold and desolation is invoked, where “she” is preserved, along with her “undeadness, her petrified unrest” as of “the ending of time within her” (14). Here is perhaps the eking of time that follows a tremendous loss, and its constant reminder that “it wasn’t worth going to the trouble/ of turning on any more lights” (14). McGuckian’s giddy flair for casting lament into a festival of images is alchemic. Time stands still and takes on various miscalculated airs of being out of joint. In “She Wears the Sky,” for example, her mother, she says, “remembers the next five days as twelve” (27).

As well as the distortions of time, McGuckian invokes a host of anamorphic imagery to frame an illustrious new place, “a safe place,” which is also a secret place where loss and absence linger free and love resides. “The Ocean River,” for instance, presents a mirage of “double stillness” of “river sounding echoes of her personal angel” (67). Compounding shadows with light, the language ripples with “chant[s]” (67) and incantations, much like a Manichean dream in monochrome. The poem is left with “a she-wolf’s lust and restlessness,” and more than just the movements of words on a page, float up and gather around in conversation with the reader.