Abstraction

I've been having a hard time figuring out what, exactly, McGuckian is trying to say with her very lyrical poems. This excerpt from an interview from The Argotist was helpful, both to understand where McGuckian is coming from and for our own writing processes:

What's your writing process like? I'm wondering how often you write; under what circumstances; starting with a word, image or idea.

MM : My process. I don't see it as process. Sounds too recipe or technical. I want it or need it. Life gets disordered and choked with not saying to anyone as here only confusion words inadequate as tools of exploration. So, I clinically collect images, thoughts, ideas, series of words -- not single. Over a period. Then when I feel I have enough for a page of poetry. I sort them. I sift and shape. There is a dynamic between my state and the material. ... It is all up to the dance and play of the words. I just fold them into sentences like puff pastry layers.

What's your relationship to revision? Do you revise? If so, what toward? If not, why no?
MM: I hardly revise unless I was too tired when writing the thing and it was a mess. Then I cut and shear and sort but it is never a great success-- a B version. Peter my publisher says I write a cluster of poems around the same theme and only one is THE poem. If the moment of inspiration is right then it all happens properly or the poems curdle or set like a jelly or concrete. ...I tried once going back to a set of words I had and chose completely different ones and a different poem emerged. But not probably any better a one.

McGuckian "collect[s] images, thoughts, ideas, series of words" to create her poetry. The poetry certainly has a rhythmical feeling, and McGuckian does mix concrete objects with abstract ideas and feelings. McGuckian says that she writes poetry in one sitting (once she has the ideas), sort of a "hit or miss" concept with lots of emphasis on inspiration. Unlike Yeats, say, she does not begin with a clear intention and goal for what the reader should come away with--I get the feeling that even part of the way through a poem, the intention might shift (intentionally done, of course); her method of composition is so fluid and organic that I am intrigued (but also mystified).

This poem is a pretty typical example:

Felicia's Cafe

Darkness falls short by an hour
Of this summer's inhibitions:
Only the cold carpet
That owns a kind of flower
Feeds any farm or ocean
Around the bedroom's heart.

Each day of brown perfection
May be colour enough for bees:
The part of my eye
That is not golden sees.

First of all, I'm not exactly sure how the title relates to the poem--as far as I can see, typical "cafe" items don't particularly appear in the poem. There is some perky imagery ("flower," "golden," "colour") that fits with positive image that we normally associate with a cafe. The second part of the first stanza is especially nebulous: there are a lot of dissimilarr elements/objects that are put together: carpet, flower, farm, ocean, and bedroom. McGuckian also uses the color brown frequently as a motif--instead of our normal conception of brown as mundane,boring, etc., she uses it as an indication of interest and perfection. Here, it is as if bees are attracted to brown flowers. In the final line of the poem, McGuckian may be playing off of the identical sound of "sees" and "seas"--and the parallel of that to the line "feeds any farm or ocean." What is the significance of all of this? I'm not entirely sure. I feel that the author has almost painted such an abstract painting, that while aesthetic, I could not identify the subject.