Wake Forest University Press

Irish Poetry

Eilean Ni Chuilleanain - Selected Poems

"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

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Admired in Ireland since the 1970s, Ní Chuilleanáin...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

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...A deep, rich compilation of her work. Mythical and mysterious, they feel ancient and yet express the timeless pulls and aches of nature and religions, of the rifts between the sexes and the world of the domestic.  American Poet

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...[A]n archetypal wise woman in verse ... Ní Chuilleanáin ... casts magic spells with her poems. Benjamin Ivry, Newark Star-Ledger

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"There is something second-sighted about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's work. Her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once at plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer's greetings. "  Seamus Heaney