NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN, Eiléan

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Nationality: Irish. Born: Cork, 28 November 1942. Education: University College, Cork, B.A. in English and history 1962, M.A. in English 1964; Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1964–66, B.Litt. in Elizabethan prose 1969. Family: Married Macdara Woods in 1978; one son. Career: Lecturer, 1966–85, and since 1985 senior lecturer, Trinity College, Dublin. Founder, with Pearse Hutchinson, Macdara Woods and Leland Bardwell, Cyphers literary magazine, 1975. Awards: Irish Times prize, 1966; Patrick Kavanagh prize, 1973, for Acts and Monuments; Books Ireland Publishers' award, 1975, for Site of Ambush; O'Shaughnessy prize, Irish-American Cultural Foundation, 1992. Address: Trinity College, University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Publications

Poetry

Acts and Monuments. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1972.

Site of Ambush. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1975.

The Second Voyage. Dublin, Gallery Press, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1977; Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

Cork. The Rose-Geranium. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1981.

The Magdalene Sermon. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1989; as The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1991.

The Brazen Serpent. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Press, 1995.

Other

Editor, Irish Women: Image and Achievement. Dublin, Arlen House, 1985.

Editor, Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth. London, J.M. Dent, 1993.

Editor, with J.D. Pheifer, Noble and Joyous Histories: English Romances 1375–1650. Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1993.

Editor, The Water Horse: Poems in Irish, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Oldcastle, Gallery Books, 1999.

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Critical Studies: "Contemporary Women Poets in Ireland" by Robert H. Henigan, in Concerning Poetry (Bellingham, Washington), 18(1–2), 1985; "'What You Have Seen Is Beyond Speech': Female Journeys in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin" by Sheila C. Conboy, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Saskatoon, Canada), 16(1), July 1990; "'Out of Myth into History': The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin" by Deborah Sarbin, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Saskatoon, Canada), 19(1), July 1993; 'The Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear': A Study of the Struggle of Irish Women Poets with the Tradition of Modern Irish Poetry (dissertation) by Eileen Marie Thompson, University of Oregon, 1994; "'How Things Begin to Happen': Notes on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian" by Peter Sirr, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 31(3), summer 1995; "'Our Bodies' Eyes and Writing Hands': Secrecy and Sensuality in Ní Chuilleanáin's Baroque Art" by Dillon Johnston, in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, edited by Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997; "Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry" by John Kerrigan, in Critical Quarterly, 40(4), winter 1998.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin comments:

My work issues from problems in everyday life, but it does so obliquely, via myths, folklore, and history. It draws on visual description of rooms and landscapes, on childhood memories and literary allusions, and since these are sometimes enigmatic, my poems can be so too.

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Since 1966, when she won the Irish Times prize for poetry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has written with a remarkable consistency of theme and method. Her subject matter is personal, but it is seen through a strange perspective. Although the "I" of the poems has always been the personal "I," it is revealed through odd angles and amazing connections between mythical moments and moments of skewed looking. She is a poet of empty kitchens, silent, well-lit places, well-scrubbed tables. She shares with Thomas Kinsella that peculiar ability to find genius in odd corners. The drama in her poems is a reductive one. A poem often begins with a moment of insight, an epiphany, and is then reduced to a series of physical descriptions. Her geography is askew because she is highly sensitive to the play of light on objects. Her world is "ridged / Pocked and dented" with the decency of thought:

And wake again in an afternoon bed
Grey light sloping from window-ledge
To straw-seated armchair. I get up,
Walk down a silent corridor
To the Kitchen. Twilight and a long scrubbed table...

In "The Ropesellers" she finds "a soft corner of sunlight," and in "Atlantis" there is "light wavering in water," while in "Chrissie," a poem from The Magdalene Sermon, "Light fills the growing cavity / That swells her, that ripens to her ending." Her ability to notice well-lit cavities and sunlit corners is symptomatic of solitary character or at least of the flight toward solitude. But these solitudes are not aimless; they are loaded with adult perceptions and become energized with a deep unease:

What man forgets, at home
In the long noons of peace
His own imprisonment or the day of his release?

It is in the sequence Cork that these images of well-lit places are fully orchestrated. The sequence originally accompanied drawings of Cork City by Brian Lalor and was subsequently republished in The Rose-Geranium. In "Cork" Ní Chuilleanáin tries to match Lalor's lines with her own, this time the well-lit corners being mainly exterior:

The spiders are preparing for autumn.
They weave throughout the city:
Selecting the light for their traps,
They swell with darkness.

Because of its peculiar geography—all "insolent flights of steps," "gables and stacks," and "painted windowsills"—Cork City provides an ideal myth kitty for a poet with Ní Chuilleanáin's sensitivity. The success of the sequence lies in its perfect marriage of talent and material. "The Rose-Geranium" is a more sensual and human poem, with its touched textures, bodies folded, pillow, jam jar, and pear tree. The poet's presence is stronger and the descriptions more judgmental:

I seek for depths as planets fly from the sun,
What holds me in life is flowing from me and I flow
Falling, out of true.

Despite these silent places there is a constant movement, both physical and spiritual, in Ní Chuilleanáin's poems. She has been a voyager through the physical world in ferryboats—"Shipbuilders all believe in fate; / The moral of the ship is death"—in airplanes—"We came down above the houses / In a stiff curve, and / At the edge of Paris airport / Saw an empty tunnel"—or through ferry and ferry road to that described in "Dreaming in the Ksar Es Souk Motel." The places described are places of arrival, a half-carpeted room in Rome or a familiar bed in Oxford. In many of Ní Chuilleanáin's poems there is a displaced psyche, a much traveled and much disrupted point of view. The spirit seeks a resting place. The poet is never entirely unpacked before the psyche has to orientate itself again in "one more of your suddenly furnished houses." Her poems constantly say, "We live here now," with "now" the shifting sand upon which the poet builds a frantic, distracted foothold. Yet she does build a foothold, and the speed with which she builds has created a skeptical, edgy viewpoint. It is remarkably free from the many stultifying parishes of Irish poetry. Venturing forth, or voyaging, has provided Ní Chuilleanáin with her great intellectual context. Her world has remained passionately self-centered, but she is aware of the one voyaging pedigree:

Turn west now, turn away to sleep
And you are simultaneous with
Maelduin setting sail...
With Odysseus crouching again
Inside a fish-smelling sealskin,
Or Anticlus...

These mythical voyagers—Maelduin, Odysseus, and Anticlus—are the only pedigree Ní Chuilleanáin has acknowledged. She has chronicled the lives of various women from both a historical and personal viewpoint. In particular she has a strange empathy with Roman Catholic sisters, from convent life in "The Rose-Geranium"—"nothing is to be mine / Everything ours"—to convent life in Calais—"They handed her back her body, / its voices and its death." She has spoken of the used and subdued bodies of women and of the wife who collects the "rifled / Remains of her husband." But it is reticence rather than polemic that distinguishes her work. She is the least directly political of Irish poets, knowing that "in retrospect, it is all edge." Ní Chuilleanáin is one of the constant outsiders in Irish poetry, never staying in any one parish long enough to collect her polling card. She is free of prejudice and pretense. It is to the mythical voyagers that she owes allegiance. There is a whiff of much traveled intelligence from her work, as if she were up and going long before cow shit or bog water could cling to her boots.

—Thomas McCarthy