Selected Poems | Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

$12.95 Original price was: $12.95.$10.36Current price is: $10.36.

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.

Reviews 

“There is something second sighted, as it were, about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work by which I don’t mean that she has any prophetic afflatus, more that her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greetings. ”
– Seamus Heaney

“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

“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

“. . . 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

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