Selected Poems | Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin - Softcover

Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930630441 ISBN 13: 9781930630444

Publisher: Wake Forest University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Selected Poems gathers poems from six collections of poetry, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), and proves that she is one of the major poets in Ireland. While her numerous images of mythical figures, travelers, pilgrims, and women especially of the veiled subject of the nun remind us of our deepest inner sanctum, with its litany of spiritual truths, human fears and needs, these images also catalogue the importance of the ordinary and the domestic as new metaphors for human experiences and emotions. Ní Chuilleanáin allows those who have been silenced in history to surface in art as surreal but living presences.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Cork in 1942, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin graduated from University College Cork in 1962, with a BA in English and History, followed by a MA in English in 1964, and she also studied at Oxford University. Ní Chuilleanáin was Associate Professor of English, Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Letters), and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin until her retirement in 2011. Since then she has continued to teach an option on John Donne and also contributes to the M.Phil in Medieval Language, Literature and Culture, and to the M.Phils in Literary Translation and Comparative Literature. Ní Chuilleanáin edits the literary journal Cyphers with two other poet-editors, including her husband MacDara Woods. She and her husband have a son, Niall. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is often cited not only as a major poet in the generation after Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Richard Murphy, but also as the foremost female poet now writing in Ireland and Great Britain. In 1992, she was awarded the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award by The Irish American Cultural Institute. Her most recent volume, The Boys of Bluehill (2015), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her previous volumes include Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; Site of Ambush (1975); The Second Voyage (1977), which included selections from the previous two volumes; The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems (1991); The Brazen Serpent (1995); The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2002); Selected Poems (2009); The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012), translations from the Romanian poetry of Ileana M?l?ncioiu. With Medbh McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin also co-translated the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in The Water Horse (2001).

Review

In 'Gloss / Clós / Glas,' a poem originally published in The Girl who Married the Reindeer, and placed at the close of the new Selected Poems, the mystic material grows out of a traditional portrait. The poem portrays a scholar who, as he works in his study researching etymologies, experiences a kind of transformation. Here are the last ten lines:

The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.

I love how effortlessly Ní Chuilleanáin collapses the usual divisions between intellect and imagination: she has the books turn animal, even while she develops the transforming simile, the dream transport, with studious and exacting care. Masterful sentence structure carries the whole passage: for instance, the participle pouring, which at first seems expressionistic and strange, becomes lucid and naturalistic when repeated. This ending depicts a moment when the delineating power of language fails, as opposites of age and gender approach one another in a near epiphany. And yet the whole poem itself is about the power of words. --Peter Campion, Poetry

Admired in Ireland since the 1970s, Ni Chuilleanain...deserves American attention too. ...[D]rawn to visionary experience, yet alert to domestic and urban detail, she looks at once inward to things of the spirit and outward to coastlines, Continental Europe and an omnipresent sea. ... Her visionary sentences favor soft consonants and muffled stops, without rhyme: their tones vary from celebratory to bitter, from the openly prayerful to the curtly appalled. ... --Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1930630441
• ISBN 13: 9781930630444
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 118