Collected Poems | Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
$19.95 – $29.95
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems gathers nine collections of poetry, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The Mother House (2020), as well as new poems and translations. Her poetry is scrupulously controlled but also continuously startling, using the language of history, religion, landscape, and myth. Travelers, pilgrims, and women—especially 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 metaphors for human experiences and emotions. Ní Chuilleanáin allows those who have been silenced by history to surface in art as surreal but living presences. It is now unquestionably apparent that she is one the major poets in contemporary Ireland.
Kindle version available on Amazon.com
EPUB version available on Nook
Praise for Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
“As the poems in this great Collected now show us, as well as being a poet of history, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is also a poet for the present, anxious moment. The knowledge her work contains is urgent human knowledge, exquisite in its feeling and accomplished in its polish. This Collected is her latest monumental act of self-scrutiny and illumination. It is a joy to hold in one’s hands. Truly, it is a cache of gold.”
–Thomas McCarthy
“Ní Chuilleanáin [has a] career-long attraction to the imagery of water. It appears in her poems not only in rivers and seas and oceans, but also in wells, waves, clouds, floods, and even in cupped hands. And water is a well-chosen image, for the lives of the nuns and wise women that Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry asks us to see, with their outward submission and renunciation and secret interior of liberation and empowerment, find analogues in the properties of water. Water, too, is both yielding and firm. It is so ubiquitous that we often take it for granted, yet life is unsustainable for long without it. It can be as ephemeral as dew, as irresistible as a flood. It is unremarkable and miraculous. Given enough time, the water that splashes off a child’s hand can carve the Grand Canyon. With that same long-gathering effect, Ní Chuilleanáin’s subtlety and indirection have grown into a monument in Collected Poems.”
–Paul Scott Stanfield, Hong Kong Review of Books
“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has been one of Ireland’s most original poetic voices for nearly fifty years, writing poems that are both brilliant and moving. Her deeply personal work tackles difficult topics from Catholicism to politics to language itself. Wake Forest is offering us her combined works in one volume—a delectable treat, especially because it includes new poems to feast on.”
–Helen Emmitt, Centre College
“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry works like memory, situating itself between what is real and what insists on being named as real, reaching a sharpened significance with each successive return. Questioning the certainty of our perceptions, her poems meditate on the nature of truth and reality; questioning whether we are what we think we are, they are also philosophical explorations of identity. Her Collected Poems reads like the library she describes in ‘Two Poems for Pearse Hutchinson’: ‘a case of blades, / every one sharpened and the sharpest closest to hand.'”
–Carmen Bugan, Harvard Review
“Her poems have the quality of revelatory dreams, the language of the speaker as closely-textured as a fabric of tight stitching, so much so that they can at times seem private or secretive. But her lines, even the more elusive ones, carry the power to rise into the reader’s imagination and lodge there; their mystery is often enough.”
–Gerard Smyth, Dublin Review of Books
Description
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems gathers nine collections of poetry, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The Mother House (2020), as well as new poems and translations. Her poetry is scrupulously controlled but also continuously startling, using the language of history, religion, landscape, and myth. Travelers, pilgrims, and women—especially 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 metaphors for human experiences and emotions. Ní Chuilleanáin allows those who have been silenced by history to surface in art as surreal but living presences. It is now unquestionably apparent that she is one the major poets in contemporary Ireland.
Kindle version available on Amazon.com
EPUB version available on Nook
Praise for Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
“As the poems in this great Collected now show us, as well as being a poet of history, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is also a poet for the present, anxious moment. The knowledge her work contains is urgent human knowledge, exquisite in its feeling and accomplished in its polish. This Collected is her latest monumental act of self-scrutiny and illumination. It is a joy to hold in one’s hands. Truly, it is a cache of gold.”
–Thomas McCarthy
“Ní Chuilleanáin [has a] career-long attraction to the imagery of water. It appears in her poems not only in rivers and seas and oceans, but also in wells, waves, clouds, floods, and even in cupped hands. And water is a well-chosen image, for the lives of the nuns and wise women that Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry asks us to see, with their outward submission and renunciation and secret interior of liberation and empowerment, find analogues in the properties of water. Water, too, is both yielding and firm. It is so ubiquitous that we often take it for granted, yet life is unsustainable for long without it. It can be as ephemeral as dew, as irresistible as a flood. It is unremarkable and miraculous. Given enough time, the water that splashes off a child’s hand can carve the Grand Canyon. With that same long-gathering effect, Ní Chuilleanáin’s subtlety and indirection have grown into a monument in Collected Poems.”
–Paul Scott Stanfield, Hong Kong Review of Books
“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has been one of Ireland’s most original poetic voices for nearly fifty years, writing poems that are both brilliant and moving. Her deeply personal work tackles difficult topics from Catholicism to politics to language itself. Wake Forest is offering us her combined works in one volume—a delectable treat, especially because it includes new poems to feast on.”
–Helen Emmitt, Centre College
“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry works like memory, situating itself between what is real and what insists on being named as real, reaching a sharpened significance with each successive return. Questioning the certainty of our perceptions, her poems meditate on the nature of truth and reality; questioning whether we are what we think we are, they are also philosophical explorations of identity. Her Collected Poems reads like the library she describes in ‘Two Poems for Pearse Hutchinson’: ‘a case of blades, / every one sharpened and the sharpest closest to hand.'”
–Carmen Bugan, Harvard Review
“Her poems have the quality of revelatory dreams, the language of the speaker as closely-textured as a fabric of tight stitching, so much so that they can at times seem private or secretive. But her lines, even the more elusive ones, carry the power to rise into the reader’s imagination and lodge there; their mystery is often enough.”
–Gerard Smyth, Dublin Review of Books
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