LAUSR

ABSTRACT Both Heaney and McGuckian employ imagery of the female body in pain as a site of political violence in their works. The violence which led to over 3,600 deaths, haunts both poet’s collections. The female body, in both representational and metaphorical ways, is skewed within Heaney’s collection. While Seamus Heaney’s poetry collection North opened up a space for highlighting the human cost of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the writing of gendered experiences reinforces traditional nationalist stereotypes which leave women silenced. Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen’, for example, depicts the silent disintegration and absorption of a woman’s body into the land, conjuring links between womanhood and nationhood. The development of gendered writing is explored here in relation to Medbh McGuckian’s debut collection The Flower Master, which responds to this literary silencing. This collection introduces an embodied experience of nationalist womanhood, with women’s experiences being written into the literary narrative of the conflict. The women speakers speak of the absorbed traumas of the Troubles; each becoming a kind of ‘living’ corpse. I argue that The Flower Master recalibrates the meaning of ‘Mother Ireland’ and situates the (living) female body as a medium for communicating the lived experiences of political violence.