Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, poet

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear All:


When I was plundering all the poetry I could find, back in 1969 in Chico, California as a University TA



(link)

http://www.csuchico.edu/


, I happened upon an Irish poet, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and had that sensation Emily Dickinson speaks of:


"if I feel the top of my head has been taken off,
I know that is poetry" . . .


Buy her ( Eilean . . .) poetry through Amazon.com:



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/searc ... 58-9015347


She is virtually unknown in this country, yet, with Evan Boland, is Ireland's greatest woman poet.

( p.s. Personally, I think she's a hell of a lot better than Evan Boland!)



--Z

[Zlatko Waterman]

Some commentary, with excerpts from Eilean:




Eilean Ni Chuilleanain’s The Second Voyage is actually a redaction of two of her earlier books: Acts And Monuments (1966) and Site of Ambush (1975). Her voice and technique are so solid, so secure, and contain deep echoes of older poetry, as Irish verse tends to do. But there is a bracing coldness to her voice at times, an unwillingness to sentimentalize or deal with things other than they are. No dreamy wistfulness and Celtic mist here.

Ni Chuilleanain’s power of observation is what strikes the reader. She is always capable of giving ordinary things a kind of glow, but she doesn’t just see things, she sees through them and around them:

My black cat lies still,
Washed, in the third of her lives
Veteran squatter, porte-malheur, she survives
Absorbing light on the sill.
(from “Cypher”)

And yet she never universalizes them beyond their particularity (as Yeats often does so well). In reading her verse, one is always caught in a uniquely existential moment, left having to deal with the hardness of objects, the “thingness of things.” She seldom generalizes or abstracts a moment in time but leaves it to itself. And therein is its universality.

Starting from the window, the bars
And the three brick walls, the cherry tree
In the centre of the yard, most of its leaves
Lying light as feathers beneath, but some
Still clinging by twos and threes —
Not enough to shield the planet
Hanging there like a fruit.
(from “Lost Star”)

Of course, this emphasis on particularity forces her stick to the shorter lyric forms. When she does write narrative, it is seldom at length, and even then she tends to look a pieces of narrative only. Bits of story rather than developed tales. But the lyric moment is her great theme, and she handles it well.
And her voice, as I said, harks back rather than stretching into experimentation or self-consciousness. Is it her Irishness? That great heritage of song and music and dance? The references to Irish myth and landscape occupy her here, as they do other Irish poets from Ferguson and Yeats through Kinsella and Heaney. Consider the line “I was reading my book in a ruin / By a sour candle.” Only in Ireland, I think, could a poet describe a candle as “sour.”

All that cultural richness is, in an odd way, a terrible burden for Irish poets to bear. How does one establish a fresh poetic voice when there are so many expectations to acknowledge but move beyond? I always found Kinsella’s late experimental verse somewhat disconcerting — but I think I understand what he was trying to achieve— attempting to get beyond that almost epic tone that the Irish strike so well and perhaps too easily.

But Ni Chuilleanain often manages to get beyond that Irish rhetoric by sticking to the simple facts of each particular.

Missing from the map, the abandoned roads
Reach across the mountain, threading into
Clefts and valleys, shuffle between thick
Hedges of flowery thorn.
The grass flows into tracks of wheels
Mowed evenly by the careful sheep;
Drenched, it guards the gaps of silence
Only trampled on the pattern day.
(from “Old Roads”)

She even describes the origins of her love for the details in a poem called “Early Recollections”:

Childhood gave me hope
And no warnings.
I discovered the habits of moss
That secretly freezes the stone,
Rust softly biting the hinges
To keep the door always open.
I became aware of truth
Like the tide helplessly rising and falling in one place.

Just breathtaking, in my opinion. Like all good poets, she is hard to describe, but worth seeking out. And as if to endorse my protest against the Irish male poets, she even has a fine sort of feminist manifesto in the poem “Wash”— this being the second stanza:

Wash the man out of the woman:
The strange sweat from her skin, the ashes from her hair.
Stretch her to dry in the sun
The blue marks on her breast will fade.

I hope that at least gives you a feel for a wonderful poet who was left out of the official anthologies. Happy St. Patrick’s Day — or in keeping with my protest for this year at least, Happy St. Patricia’s Day.

— Robert Hudson


Copyright © 2001-2004 by Robert Hudson. All rights reserved. This e-zine is published for the benefit and amusement of its readers and may not be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.
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