IN:\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>Partit\u00fara Irodalomtudom\u00e1nyi foly\u00f3irat, Volume XX. , Issue 2, 2025, page 3-24.\u00a0, ISSN 1336-7307<\/span> DOI:\u00a0<\/strong>10.17846\/PA.2025.20.2.3-24<\/p>\n Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n In this essay, I endeavour to re-read two of McGuckian\u2019s early poems (The Heiress; The Mast Year), which the reception rarely reads in juxtaposition, despite the fact that the two texts, in addition to being related in terms of their central metaphor, are placed next to each other as closing poems, both in Medbh McGuckian\u2019s first volume entitled The Flower Master (1982) and the revised edition thereof, entitled The Flower Master and Other Poems (1993). Through re-reading the poems an attempt will be made to highlight some linguistic manoeuvres \u2013 related, among others, to unmarked quotations from Antonia Fraser, allusions to Edmund Spenser and Ovid paving the way for associations to Shakespeare too, and the destabilisation (or, in a de Manian sense, allegorisation) of metaphoric structures drawing also on symbolic hybridity \u2013 which, in the context of certain discursive (colonial and anticolonial discourses) and genre-related (aisling, Jacobite song) conventions, can be construed as strategic elements in a carefully composed system of conceptual hybridity in the Bhabhaian sense. In the course of analysing these manoeuvres my reading will point to alternative interpretational possibilities regarding the concept of woman and nation in these poems, while widening their intertextual horizon through complementing the already identified, unmarked quotations from Fraser with the allusions mentioned above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n