Máighréad Medbh, Dwelling

 

Life and Limb ¦ May 2024.
after reading Fady Joudah’s […] 

I crawl out of memory
and style myself into the landscape. 

I am not the mark the stylus makes
but I mould myself around it for life. 

Daily as I stretch my limbs
I am in the presence of death and 

mutilation. Repetition is the essence
of memory but forgets itself 

when memory becomes limb.
I remember what was said before, 

in so many volumes, about the pain
of imposed walking, 

the levelling, buildings put sideways
like windblown grass. 

And how slowly the system stirred.
Now I wonder if it ever stirred. 

Stretching and folding, my body aches
without solace for you, the limbless.

The latest from Irish poet Máighréad Medbh, and the first I’ve seen of her work, is the wonderfully expansive Dwelling (Belfast Ireland: Macha Press, 2026), a hefty narrative examination through family story across the prose lyric. Centred around the author’s great-grandmother, Kate, Medbh works through threads of archive and speculation around a figure nearly erased, possibly deliberately so, from her own history. “To say Kate was illiterate is not to say that culture and history were illegible to her; to / say I can read and write is not to say I understand them. The face is not a language,” she writes, in the extended piece “The Mark,” “but in a way it is made by language, by what Roland Barthes calls the ‘sentence’ of / discourse. Culture and history are continual encodings and we are always reading.” Medbh’s Dwelling leans very much into the structure of the portioned, personal essay via the prose poem, offering full sentences and a rhythmed line break and lyric pause, comparable to structures by such as Anne Carson, or the prose of Susan Howe. Through the prose poems of Dwelling—set in an assemblage of six titled and untitled section-clusters, including “The Limits of Nostalgia,” “Close to the Wind (Walking),” “Her Mark,” “Faces for Kate (Concept for a Script)” and “The World as a Wind Turbine (Turnings)”—Medbh offers a kind of scrapbook structure, beautifully designed and packaged. Constructed across sentences, focused on and around the figure of Kate, although with a “Note to the Text” at the end that clarifies:

This is a book of poetry, not history, and so not entirely factual. It speculates and dramatizes. In this sense, the people who appear in it are functional avatars rather than historical persons. They are a means of exploring and attempting empathy with the experience of others.

Her exploration of form is striking, allowing for an open lyric, not tied to a single approach, but allowing for what the music of her lines might require. Structured in collage, there’s something quite delightful in the way Medbh’s pieces interplay across the larger narrative, offering archival documents, lists and scripted dialogue amid pointed prose and sentences that lean into song. “The story ends. Breath is expelled and returns.” she writes, to begin the sequence “Auditorium,” “For a while you were stationed outside yourself. / You are still half-there.”