The Mother House

$13.95

The Mother House is rich with images of orphans, exiles, migrants, the defeated, decay, destruction, famine, disaster, the cloistered, the drowned, the marginalized, disappearance and memory, music and loss. The poems speak of histories, in Ireland and elsewhere, as allegories of our age. Yet, the poetic is not offered as a salvo or a salve, for as the poet questions, “We made the long journey // to deliver the gesture, but who has noticed us?” Ní Chuilleanáin nevertheless proves that when the mirror is held at the right angle the past can shed a telling light upon the present, observing with great acumen, “it was like history, held there / in view of another lifetime.” In this remarkable volume, art and literature reflect human suffering and survival across many frontiers.

Winner of the 2020 Irish Times Poetry Now award

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EPUB version available on Apple Books
EPUB version available on Nook

Praise for The Mother House:

“Ní Chuilleanáin’s instinct has always been to compose poems with camera angles. … She has been a word-cinematographer, and her camerawork has always been that of a woman voyaging, capturing the light, the angles and the briefly glimpsed faces of strangers or fellow voyagers. … Yet another perfect book from this poet of sunlight and cloisters.”
– Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books

“In The Mother House, Ní Chuilleanáin’s established preoccupations—allegorical journeys, the ghosts of the past, religious life—are copiously on show, but with a newly sharpened elegiac edge.”
– Aingeal Clare, The Guardian