“I have a pain in our teeth…” says Sister Mary Anthony in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s J’ai Mal Á Nos Dents quarter way through her Collected Poems – not just one nun’s community mindset, but also a reflection of Ní Chuilleanáin’s often puzzling point of view. As her gaze shifts, time stretches and collapses. Sometimes boundaries dissolve – like this Dublin scene on Corpus Christi Sunday:
…Cross a lane: a kitchen
bare, darkening… one shadow milk bottle,
…basement - a bald man in his sleeves
. . . whose lives
bulge against me, as soft as plums in a bag
sagging in summer… (Atlantis)
Identities are fluid – who speaks in the tremendous Woman Shoeing A Horse?
I could see the line of her back and the flash of her hair
As she came from the fields at a call…
I could see by her shoulders how her breath shifted
In the burst of heat, and the wide gesture of her arm…
It is followed five pages later by Man Watching A Woman:
He stops and watches. He needs to see this
A woman working late at the refectory,
sewing a curtain…
These uncertain watchers, a key feature of real dreams, solidly anchored by crisp, concrete description – “they lifted the old sisters on to the pig-cart/and the young walked out on the road to Desvres,/the wine still buzzing and the planes over their heads.” (J’ai Mal Á Nos Dents)– draw us in too so that ultimately we are having “a pain in our teeth”, arrested in the shaft of Ní Chuilleanáin’s powerful vision.
Vision is central in Ag Stánadh Amach (Gazing Out) from the Coda, originally written in Irish by Ní Chuilleanáin with a direct English translation on the facing page. A signature poem, it shows Ní Chuilleanáin’s mighty lens “gazing out” in all its glory, her colours as acute as they are at the beginning when bog water is orange and foxes are yellow against navy tree trunks (Acts and Monuments (1972). The Odyssean movement of that first book has ceased, the watcher is still, a little fearful. History lies open at “a high upstairs window”, Georgian Dublin evoked in the “Fine high narrow stairs:
…what did she see only a great host of people, only that she could not see them clearly because of the snow…falling for ages.
Why did the words come back to her, the words of the wise woman?"
A man awkwardly carrying a big bundle, a woman following him, a child on her back and another held by the hand, a young girl running at her side. Old people at the back, left behind. The snow ceaselessly falling, leaching every tinge from their old clothes, they shielded their heads and their faces as well as they could against the wind, in the hope of not being recognized.
One could muse forever on the identity of this shape-shifting “host”. Refugees? Or the Sidhe, the fairy host so memorably associated with Irish famine victims in the work of Angela Bourke? Ní Chuilleanáin’s terrific version of Piers Plowman Passus VI, also in the Coda, transplants Hunger to an Irish famine landscape, celebrating the festival of Lughnasa. But the “Noise of lorries far away” indicates more recent past or the future, while The Táin’s Fidelm warning Queen Maeve, “I see them crimson, I see them red” delves further back.
Every Coda poem is a translation, highlighting how words converse with each other across language, how one language haunts another and drags its history in its wake. A fine translation of Baudelaire’s The Swan in the Coda recalls The Unreconcile from Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Mother House, whose central unforgettable image is Baudelaire’s swan lost on a Paris building site. Ag Stánadh Amach/ Gazing Out picks up that idea of the “defeated”, “stranded” souls from The Unreconcile:
nothing can shift the weight, the hundred stones in the
school yard
are founded on deeper buried stones, a hundred
men and women are crying in underground hospital
car parks –
Perfect line breaks exhibit the fine sense of form which anchors every poem in this timeless collection. No amount of description can sum up the vast complications and pleasure to be found here among her shape-shifting, tantalising, slippery dream-words. Perhaps Ní Chuilleanáin’s own Gloss/Clós/Glas is the best showcase:
The rags of language…streaming like weathervanes,
…weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
…the looking-glass pages…words
pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
pouring through the slit in the fence…
…he reaches the language that has no word for his,
no word for hers…
like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
…steam of her breath…turning the locked lock green.
