Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

poem remain sealed, self contained and suffering. Unlike Heaneyís
Sweeney who is given wings and exile against his wishes, at the end
of ëThe Over Motherí, McGuckianís speaker is imagined facing the
audience who hope for a flight that is left unfulfilled. In psy-
choanalytic terms, the boundaries between bodies and the thetic
boundary that rests within language can be ambushed but never fully
crossed. The poem bears testimony then, to the limitations of the
Symbolic and the difficulties of communication whether it is linguistic
or physical. The poem charts a tension between being confined and
the potential for escape, and also how that tension maps onto the
confinement of language (silence) and the expression of the self
(poetry).
The relation between the subliminal and the sublime, and the
body and space may be explored further. According to Kristeva, the
limit of representation is understood as the thetic border between a
semiotic maternal realm that is unrepresentable and a Symbolic
phallic realm of representation. In this way, her theories of subliminal
or bodily limits can be understood alongside writing about the post-
modern sublime and the notion of thinking at the limit or alluding to
the unamenable to representation that was discussed in relation to the
male poets. Both French feminist and postmodern theory confront the
incomprehensible or the boundary between the rational and irrational
ñ that which is conceivable and inconceivable. In ëPostmodern
McGuckianí Thomas Docherty chooses to read McGuckianís articu-
lation of borderlands in terms of subliminal bodily limits and the
sublime limits of representation. He argues that her poetry breaks
away from ëplace logicí or territorial borders with the effect of
demonstrating that this can be understood in terms of postmodern
formulations of identity. However, this assertion can be resituated to
argue that McGuckianís deterritorializing move away from ëplace-
logicí rests somewhere between a post-colonial urge to transgress the
borders of a colonial territory and feminism as it takes leave from
traditional understandings of gendered identity. Unlike the male poets,
McGuckianís deterritorialization takes us into a poetry that undoes
and transcends the limits of gender and, in this way, her poetry moves
a step further towards decolonization.