Bringing a female poet’s touch to the memories of her mother

Recall Seamus Heaney’s ‘Sunlight’, a poem that transforms the process of his mother cooking scones almost into a religious experience; or Patrick Kavanagh’s In Memory of My Mother, which elevates the deceased parent into a mythical, saint-like figure.

In the poem ‘The Blood Trolley’ from her latest collection The High Caul Cap, Medbh McGuckian takes a different approach to those poets.