RESULTS

In 1979 Medbh McGuckian won England's National Poetry Competition. Three years later she published her first collection, The Flower Master. In The Sunday Times Christopher Reid welcomed it as 'highly accomplished... something strikingly new... Her work moves with great dignity and assurance, while her characteristic first-person speaking voice, imitating no other writer's, beguiles one immediately'. This radically revised edition incorporates additional bewitching, sensuous poems and makes available again persuasive evidence of an original and gorgeous body of work.

In Medbh McGuckian's most ambitious collection, elegies and laments for presentday disturbances fit a previous whirlwind moment, the insurgence of United Irishmen in 1798. Five sections accommodate insistent voices of ghosts from the past, the Rising itself, the quelling of that rebellion through executions, incarcerations and violent losses. A number of shorter poems add energy and urgency to the book's growing awareness of the fact of a buried tragedy. Ultimately, Shelmalier is a book of consoling art and lasting meaning, at once a memorial and an example for our time.