Collected Poems

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems
The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, places her in the front rank of poets currently writing in English. And yet, although she received the prestigious Griffin Award in 2016 and in spite of the fact that her work has been attracting an increasing amount of critical attention, her poems are unlikely to be as familiar to British readers as those of her contemporaries, Heaney, Longley or Mahon. To some extent this may be an historical accident. The quality of the poetry written in the North during the Troubles was beyond dispute, but there can be little doubt that its wider dissemination was furthered by those tragic events. By contrast, poets from the South were overlooked. Born in Cork in 1942, Ní Chuilleanáin comes from a prominent Republican family with close ties to the Catholic Church, one effect of which is Ní Chuilleanáin’s self-confessed fascination with nuns. The family is also academic and artistic. Her mother was the well-known writer Eilís Dillon. Her father was a professor of Irish and her sister was a professional musician. Unsurprisingly, much of her poetry is informed by this inheritance.

However, because she is wary of writing in a too obviously autobiographical mode, her poems can be challenging. Whether she is exploring public or private events, her approach is frequently oblique. So it may be helpful for new readers if I share my own first acquaintance with her work. It was in Blackwells, Oxford, in 1972. Having immersed myself in the poems of Montague, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, and intrigued no doubt by the poet’s Gaelic name, I was drawn to Acts and Monuments, her recently published debut collection. Even now, I remember the thrill and bewilderment I felt on reading ‘Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht’, with its strangely archaic title and dreamlike ambiance:

Moon shining in silence of the night
the heaven being all full of stars
I was reading my book in a ruin
by a sour candle, without roast meat or music
strong drink or a shield from the air
blowing in the crazed window, and I felt
moonlight on my head, clear after three days’ rain.

This was poetry on a different wavelength from anything else I had been reading. What drew me in was the clarity of the images, the focus and memorability of the language: ‘I washed in cold water: it was orange, channelled down bogs / dipped between cresses.’ Initially, the fact that I didn’t know who the protagonist was or what exactly was going on was something I would have to live with. Subsequently, I found  myself wandering in a kind of parallel universe inhabited by hermits, swineherds, voyagers, exiles, and, occasionally, in poems like ‘Letter to Pearse Hutchinson’ and ‘Going Back to Oxford’, someone who might be the poet herself:

Something to lose; it came in the equipment
alongside the suicide pill and the dark blue card:
‘I am a Catholic, please send for a priest’
with a space below for the next of kin.

Revisiting these poems decades later, it still seems that the most effective way to approach them is to concentrate on those whose surface detail is most alluring and not to worry too much about those whose meaning may at first seem obscure. Gradually, as recurring patterns and themes emerge, one gets an increasing sense of a poet who is striving towards what Pasternak called ‘the heart of the matter’, the truths enshrined in the past, however provisional such ‘truths’ might be. Although narrative is a strong element in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, her stories tend to be enigmatic and fragmentary. We nearly always find ourselves in medias res, but our desire for context is all too often subverted. And yet, with some justification, the poet might argue that life is like that. ‘In ‘Family’, she finds a striking image for the elusive nature of reality: ‘Water has no memory / and you drown in it like a kind of absence’.  In ‘The House Remembered’, she suggests that truths are not only provisional but also subjective:

The house persists, the permanent
scaffolding while the stones move round …

The stairs and windows waver but the house stands up;
peeling away the walls another set shows through
and somebody was born in every room.

Like Kant, it would seem that Ní Chuilleanáin draws a distinction between ‘the world as it is’, which, ultimately, will always elude us, and ‘the world as we perceive it’.  This dichotomy is particularly poignant in ‘A Bridge Between Two Counties’ where it seems that a child is being handed over to a new family. Without knowing any of the details that have preceded this moment, the reader’s perspective is suddenly reduced to that of the child: ‘and the woman paused and passed / the child’s hand / to a glove and a sleeve’. The focus here is cinematic, a technique that the poet frequently uses to powerful effect. In ‘Following’, the opening stanza is a beautifully rendered description of a young child as she ‘follows the trail of her father’s coat through the fair / shouldering past beasts packed solid as books …’ Then there is a sudden shift to an eerier, presumably much later memory:

until she is tracing light footsteps
across the shivering bog by starlight,
the dead corpse risen from the wakehouse
gliding before her in a white habit.

 These sudden changes in perspective are at their most challenging in ‘Site of Ambush’, a sequence in eight sections which is the centrepiece of her second collection. Given the poet’s upbringing in Cork, one might be entitled to presume that the poem is about the notorious ambush of Michael Collins. However, this does not seem to be the case. Its brief opening section, ‘Reflection’, is enigmatic: ‘You are not the sun or moon / but the wolf that will swallow down both sun and moon.’ However, this soon gives way, in ‘Narration’, to a realistic description of soldiers preparing for a military engagement: ‘At ten the soldiers were climbing into lorries, / asthmatic engines drawing breath in even shifts’.  Thereafter, the ‘narrative’ becomes increasingly dreamlike as it moves across a locale haunted by ghostlike presences: the soldiers, a deaf child, a girl whose hair has been cropped, an old man sitting on a bench and then, in the sixth section, ‘Voyagers’, mythological heroes like Maelduin and Odysseus. It’s a poem in which, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, all time seems eternally present. Elsewhere, the poet’s probing of the Irish past is more immediately accessible in those poems where historical figures are more clearly delineated: James Connolly, Maria Edgeworth, or members of her own family, as in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’. Written in memory of her father, it describes his narrow escape from the Black and Tans, but expresses also his concern that he might be putting at risk the people who were giving him shelter: ‘Should he have chanced that door?’  In ‘Daniel Grose’, we are taken back to the eighteenth century, where a ‘military draughtsman / is training his eye / on the upright of the tower’. He is completing Antiquities of Ireland, a sequence of drawings for an audience whose interest in Irish history is no more than ‘a taste for ruins’. It takes the poet to remind us that the picture is incomplete:

No crowds engaged in rape or killing,
no marshalling of boy soldiers,
no cutting the hair of novices.

In ‘Old Roads’, the map of Ireland has been redrawn so that all trace of the Gaelic past has slowly been eroded.  However, in ‘A Map of Convents’, Ní Chuilleanáin celebrates the work of Nano Nagle, the founder of the Presentation Sisters and a pioneer of Catholic education at the time of the Penal Laws: ‘There was another map, / of a different place, in her head; she told nobody.’

The poet’s admiration for Nano Nagle is clear and there are poems, also, in which she writes with affection of others who have embraced the religious life, such as three of her father’s sisters. She is also fascinated by the cloistered lives of nuns who have created their own separate society independently of men. In ‘To the Mother House’, she commends the nuns’ selfless commitment to comforting and healing the sick: ‘There was a war coming, there was work. The novices / would never see a soldier, only smile / at meagre faces in the alpine sanatorium.’ In ‘The Real Thing’, the subjective nature of reality is seen in the context of religious faith and the nuns’ belief in the true nature of a holy relic, ‘the longest / known fragment of the Brazen Serpent’; while ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’ is a touching portrayal of one of the poet’s aunts who joined a convent in France. The poem’s offbeat title derives from the fact that the sisters, who have given up all personal possessions, avoid using the word ‘my’. It is not entirely clear, to this reader at least, what the poet’s personal relationship with Catholicism might be. However, in ‘Translation’, which was written ‘for the reburial of the Magdalenes’, she expresses her solidarity with those young unmarried mothers who suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church: ‘there are women here from every county, / just as there were in the laundry’; while in ‘Bessboro’ she describes a notorious mother and baby unit:

This is what I inherit –
it was never my own life,
but a house’s name I heard
and others heard as a warning
of what might happen a girl
daring and caught by ill luck:
a fragment of desolate
fact, a hammer-note of fear –

The various scandals which have, in recent decades, undermined the once inviolable authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland are only one aspect of Ní Chuilleanáin’s concern for those forces which have led to the marginalisation and repression of women.  In ‘St Margaret of Cortona’, we see how, in spite of her canonization, this patron saint of single mothers, reformed prostitutes, and all those who are falsely accused, cannot herself escape being categorized and even denigrated by men:

She had become, the preacher hollows his voice,
a name not to be spoken, the answer
to the witty man’s loose riddle, what’s she
that’s neither maiden, window nor wife?

In the early poem, ‘Odysseus Meets the Ghosts of the Women’, a contrast is drawn between the heroic agendas of men and the untold stories of the women they leave behind: ‘the longhaired goldbound women who had died / of pestilence, famine, in slavery.’ However, in ‘Pygmalion’s Image’, we are given a powerful sense of female emancipation when a discarded statue comes to life and finds its own voice:

The crisp hair is real, wriggling like snakes;
a rustle of veins, tick of blood in the throat;
the lines of the face tangle and catch, and
a green leaf of language comes twisting out of her mouth.

Perhaps that image of female empowerment is as good a place as any to draw a line. Within the relatively brief compass of a review it is only possible to hint at the subtlety, richness and transformative power of these poems. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems is a uniquely compelling body of work that has the coherence and inevitability of a natural growth. It is a fitting monument to her passionate concern to ride ‘the horses of meaning’ and to ‘let their hooves print the next bit of the story.’

— David Cooke, The Manchester Review

On Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Eiléan​ Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Translation’ describes a work scene in a convent laundry. Over the bustle of cleaning and ironing, one voice rises insistently, ‘sharp as an infant’s cry’. Its speaker has been incarcerated for offences against Catholic Ireland and in this brief monologue continues to expiate her shame:

Washed clean of idiom • the baked crust
Of words that made my temporary name •
A parasite that grew in me • that spell
Lifted • I lie in earth sifted to dust •
Let the bunched keys I bore slacken and fall •
I rise and forget • a cloud over my time.

The poem is subtitled ‘for the reburial of the Magdalenes’ and forms part of contemporary Ireland’s reckoning with the clerical abuses of the past – specifically, the cremation and reburial of the remains of 154 inmates of High Park Convent laundry in Glasnevin Cemetery in 1993, for which it was written. It’s oddly elliptical – allowing the victim to speak, but in a way that reinscribes her silencing. But even this constitutes a breaking of cover: ‘Why doesn’t she speak when they ask her/what has happened,’ Ní Chuilleanáin wonders in ‘Witness’, to which the immediate answer might be that no one has in fact asked.

Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrative poems are tales of ‘life with the lid on’, to echo Elizabeth Bowen. Her protagonists are typically nameless: a woman on her way to join a convent, a swineherd, a group of traveller women cooking round a campfire. Her style, with its absence of rhyme and its angular line breaks, is correspondingly muted. Compare her translation of ‘The Old Woman of Beare’ to Derek Mahon’s version of the same Old Irish text. His woman is urbane, garrulous, much like Mahon himself, and his translation has after-echoes of the palatial Yeatsian stanza. Ní Chuilleanáin’s version is stonier and unsparing, insisting that ‘I don’t join in sweet chat.’

Well for islands at sea,
their high tide follows low
water; I do not hope
my tide will turn and flow.
Hardly a harbour now
seems familiar to me;
all that the high tide saw
low water drags away.

Ní Chuilleanáin stands out even in comparison to poets such as Eavan Boland, who wrote extensively about the injustices of Irish history. Boland gravitates towards emblematic figures, the state personified by a woman, as in her poem ‘Anna Liffey’. Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrators are slow to take ownership of their own stories, let alone anyone else’s. In ‘Bessboro’ (the site of a notorious mother and baby home) she writes: ‘This is what I inherit –/it was never my own life.’ Even as her poems piece together forgotten stories, their speakers insist that their testimonies have been lost: ‘the blood that was sown here flowered/and all the seeds blew away.’

Collected Poems (Gallery Press, £19) gathers together nine of Ní Chuilleanáin’s collections, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The Mother House (2019), and ends with a scattering of new poems written in response to the death of her husband, the poet Macdara Woods, in 2018. The early books up to The Rose Geranium and Other Poems (1981) move the allegorical machinery into place: female figures wander through landscapes, often in the midst of church architecture or the ruins thereof; history hangs heavy in the air, even when references to it are oblique or parenthetical; folk and religious ceremonies form a constant backdrop; and the poems tend to end on imperfect cadences, leaving any resolution deferred, intangible or else dissolved (‘The island trimmed with waves is lost in the sea,/the swimmer lost in his dream’).

Domestic spaces are temporary and precarious. Navigators (often Odysseus) abound, sailing between islands or to the centre of the earth; even milk in a glass turns out to be tidal, following secret imperatives of its own. Her third collection contains two longer sequences, ‘Cork’ and ‘The Rose Geranium’, and the missing sections from each are the most significant omissions from this Collected. ‘Cork’ vacillates between studied non-specificity (‘We could be in any city’) and the scorched particulars of Black and Tan raids, turning the urban space into a ‘site of Ambush’ – the title of Ní Chuilleanáin’s second collection. Her return to the Irish revolutionary period is one way of confronting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, though these conflicts are very much family affairs – something she commemorates in ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’, about her father’s role in the War of Independence, and ‘Seaweed’, on her grandparents’ experience of the 1916 Rising (Joseph Mary Plunkett, the rebel leader and signatory of the Proclamation of the Republic, is Ní Chuilleanáin’s great-uncle).

Then there is the nun question. Why is Ní Chuilleanáin so drawn to them? There’s a clue in ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’, when a young nun visiting the dentist in Calais uses the first-person plural to describe her teeth. To take religious orders is to surrender one’s individuality to communal life. Later in the poem, she lifts the older nuns onto a pig cart as they flee from the Germans. At 78, she is given permission to return home to care for a sister in Ireland, before finally reclaiming ownership of her own body, ‘its voices and its death’.

Ní Chuilleanáin’s writing about religion, particularly religious art, is seen to great effect in the poems of her middle period. ‘Fireman’s Lift’, from her seventh collection, The Brazen Serpent (1994), records the Felliniesque scene of a statue of the Virgin Mary being lifted into place in a Parma church, the workers gazing up after her ‘as she came to the edge of the cloud’. Her icons are warmer than the ‘marble or … bronze repose’ ascribed to Yeats’s religious images. In ‘Our Lady of Youghal’, a lost ivory plaque of the Madonna and Child lies underground but appears to orchestrate its own dazzling rediscovery (‘inside a tower of leaves,/the virgin’s almond shrine, its ivory lids parting /behind lids of gold, bursting out of the wood’).

There’s an elegiac strain in much of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, but it becomes her dominant mode from The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), poems for her mother, the novelist Eilís Dillon, and her violinist sister who died young. But there is also a vein of anthropological parable here. Mysterious gifts are made of ashes wrapped in tissue paper, journeys undertaken, levitating anchoresses encountered, lips that ‘move in the grave’. These later poems also take the measure of modern Ireland. In ‘The Faces’, Ní Chuilleanáin sits in a traffic jam, while a woman in the car alongside hers knits and the woman’s husband ‘rages at the wheel’: ‘It was like history, held there/in view of another lifetime://we climbed the cogged wheel of our age,/our century, side by slow side.’ Meeting the demands of the age will always be difficult for a poet who ‘appears to have been born in 1870/and schooled in 1689’, a feeling that may account for Ní Chuilleanáin’s more Jacobite tendencies. Few poets’ work has more visions of lost realms and kings o’er the water, held tight in the embrace of a history that forgets nothing without ever properly getting started: ‘no unformed capricious cry/can sound without its monument.’ It would be an obtuse reader who saw these poems as gestures of unthinking nostalgia: time redeemed is as ubiquitous in Ní Chuilleanáin as the leaden time of public monuments. But often this takes the form of a tantalising absence: ‘Her history is a blank sheet,/her vows a folded paper locked like a well.’

In a lecture Ní Chuilleanáin delivered as the Ireland Professor of Poetry, later published in Instead of a Shrine (2019), she addresses the idea of ritual in Henry King’s ‘Exequy’, an elegy for his wife that begins ‘Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,/ Instead of Dirges this complaint.’ Of these twelve words, three sound a risky Catholic note for a poet who had suffered persecution during the Civil War: ‘shrine’, ‘saint’ and ‘dirges’. Fraught though they are, the words perform a slippage from the religious to the conventionally poetic (a ‘saint’ often meant a mistress in 17th-century verse). ‘What happens comes out of a lack,’ Ní Chuilleanáin writes, ‘a sense of distance from the received ritual that prompts the poem to emerge instead.’ Ní Chuilleanáin’s own work could be described as an extended exercise in the conversion of loss into re-enchantment. Among the loveliest examples of this is ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’, a poem that toys obsessively with the intimacy and distance between languages by punning on the Irish word ‘glas’, meaning ‘green’ and ‘lock’, and on the English ‘gloss’. ‘The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,’ as a scholar trawls through one of his dictionaries late at night, and a boy in a story has come to 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.’

— David Wheatley, London Review of Books

Winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reads ‘Curtain’ 

Publication Date: 29 October 2020
Details: 408pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 792 8
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 793 5

Cover: ‘Interior’ (2012) etching by Ruth O’Donnell