Wake Forest University Press

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

eilean ni chuilleanain CONGRATULATIONS TO Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin!

The Sun-fish is the International Winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1942. Her father, Cormac O'Chuilleanáin was a university professor of Irish, and her mother, Eilis Dillon, was a prolific novelist. She graduated from University College Cork in 1962, with a B.A. in English and history, followed by a master’s in English in 1964. She later studied at Oxford. She is Associate Professor of English, Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Letters), and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. She edits the literary journal, Cyphers, with two other poet-editors, including her husband MacDara Woods. She and her husband have a son, Niall.

She is often cited not only as a major poet in the generation after Kinsella, Montague and Murphy, but also as the foremost female poet now writing in Ireland and Great Britain.

She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for her first book, Acts and Monuments (1966), which was followed by Site of Ambush (1975), both published by the Gallery Press. Selections from these two books, published by Wake Forest University Press as The Second Voyage (1977), were re-issued in 1991 in a revised version, complimentary to a new book, The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems. The Magdalene Sermon was chosen as one of the three best books of poetry of 1989 by the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Book Prize Committee. Wake Forest published The Brazen Serpent in 1995, and included many of her poems in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967-2000, which came out in 1999. She and Medbh McGuckian translated the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in The Water Horse (2001), and her volume, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, came out in 2002. Wake Forest published her Selected Poems in 2009, and her newest volume, The Sun-fish, in August 2010. The Sun-fish was the International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2010.

In 1992, she was awarded the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award by The Irish American Cultural Institute, which called her “among the very best poets of her generation.”

A Brief Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin:

Hear Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin read three poems (from the BBC Today):

Recent Reviews:

from the Griffin International Poetry Prize Judges' Citation for The Sun-fish:

"She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes…. Each poem is a world complete, and often they move between worlds, as in the beautiful ‘A Bridge between Two Counties.’ These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us."

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Admired in Ireland since the 1970s, Ni Chuilleanain...deserves American attention too. ... 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 (of Selected Poems)
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I n “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 (of Selected Poems)

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