Medbh McGuckian is the doyenne of poets of her generation. In this, her eleventh groundbreaking collection, there is a new urgency, an acceleration of stanza, line and utterance: ‘All my weariness of the North / revived with double force…’

The book opens with a record of injury and the consequent prayers for her daughter. It proceeds through a series of self-portraits and invocations of women, with their folk instructions and remedies, to construct an historical narrative. Its journey comes to rest in a series of consoling ‘island’ poems.

Medbh McGuckian’s code of allegiance to the course of her imagination — see her variations on the colour blue — and the illuminating sensitivity and ardour of her work have fashioned an opus unlike any other. In the unfolding of sense and sentences she is as much a composer of atmosphere and feeling as a maker of poems.

The Currach Requires No Harbours lays bare a mastery of art by a stylist of indisputable effect and beauty.