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Sat 04 Apr 2007From colour-coded messages to skilful portraitsPoetry:Last year I visited an exhibition of work by the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky, at the Tate Modern. Each canvas showed the painter's gradual shift from figurative clarity to multi-coloured abstraction as he developed his theory that colour could stimulate emotion in the same way that classical music could. I gazed at the later paintings, attempting to decipher those gorgeous swirlings; the response, when it eventually came, was visceral rather than intellectual.The experience of reading Medbh McGuckian's poetry can be somewhat like that. She is a writer who creates images of haunting beauty using language that resists easy interpretation. She herself has described her technique as "like embroidery". In a 1990 interview with Rebecca Wilson she said: "I take an assortment of words, though not exactly at random, and I fuse them"; her latest collection, The Currach Requires No Harbours, once again offers the reader a work of richly confusing threads.