Literary Criticism:What keeps coming through this collection of illuminating essays is the profound intelligence, seriousness, humanity and sheer imaginative vitality of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's achievement as a poet.
What each essay makes clear is that - moving at her own pace in her own time, and attending scrupulously upon her own compulsions and preoccupations - she has produced, by any national or international standards, one of the most accomplished bodies of work of her generation. It's timely satisfaction, so, that in this volume of Irish University Review she has obtained a set of superb critical responses that do justice both to the matter of her various and often demanding poems and to her utterly original manner, to the ways in which she mixes uneasy but apparently simple surface particulars with depths of meaning that, in Keats's phrase, "tease us out of thought" as they hover sceptically between history, culture, politics, psychology, critique, elegy, and celebratory affirmation. The essays cast clarifying light, that is, on a poetic world in which the mysterious and the matter-of-fact join hands and are, in some uncanny way, reconciled. (At times, indeed, her poems strike me as in part a curious cross between those of Montale, Kinsella, and Clarke.)
In her comprehensive introduction, editor Anne Fogarty mentions how the many-faceted and "unremitting artistic energy" of Ní Chuilleanáin's poems elicit "an engaged and resourceful readership", and with these well-chosen contributors the poet finds just that: 12 scholar-critics from Ireland, Europe, and the US, all distinguished practitioners in the field of Irish studies, and one distinguished poet-commentator from Cork. (The volume also contains, for good measure, two new Ní Chuilleanáin poems, along with a number of her poems translated into Italian.) Whether engaged with the "copious" and "complex indeterminacies" of the poet's work (in Guinn Batten's allusive, theoretically acute, politically and culturally wide-awake essay), or with how the poems continually are a "traversing of thresholds and boundaries" in the manner of baroque art (as Dillon Johnston argues in a tonic exploration), or with those forms of enclosure and openness, freedom and constraint in Ní Chuilleanáin's unfashionable engagement with religious ritual (in Patricia Coughlan's inspired close reading of the "meditative lyrics" in The Woman Who Married the Reindeer) these essays - in articulately detailed ways that show a consistent respect for the text itself - keep opening the poems to our appreciation and understanding. In spite of her persistent engagement with issues of the spirit, though, what many of the essays demonstrate is Ní Chuilleanáin's refusal of certitudes, her positive relationship to doubt and uncertainty, her ability to practise what Keats called "negative capability".
THROUGHOUT HER WORK, Ní Chuilleanáin is, as Borbála Faragó shows, a poet of "silence and secrecy", a poet, as so many of these essays attest, of secret spaces, enclosed zones, gnomic illuminations, all folded into curious parable-narratives of haunting power. For all their secrets, however, her poems' subjects - when seen through the lens of these essays and two fine interviews (one a wide-ranging piece conducted by Patricia Haberstroh, the other focused on the poet's Italian experiences, conducted by Carla de Petris) - reveal themselves as purposefully engaged with immediate personal, emotional, cultural, and political issues. Again and again the essayists return to issues of faith and spirit - expansively demonstrated, for example, by Catriona Clutterbuck's subtle reading of the later poetry and its various negotiations between religious faith, existential good faith, and aesthetics; its openness to mystery and the resources of the spirit; its "direct engagement with the world".
While Jeffrey Hodridge does a thorough job of dealing with "Nature and the Sacred" in the poems, in Nicholas Allen's essay it is the conjunction of history and mystery, through a "subtle choreography of past and present", that distinguishes Ní Chuilleanáin's work - that and her ability to convey the "hallucinatory quotidian", as well as the subtle but persistent feminism pervading the poems. These latter qualities, indeed, are touched on by most of the essayists: the poet's recurrent treatment of women, whether in religious or domestic life or in the appalling Irish circumstances of the Magdalene laundries, being rightly esteemed as one of her most valuable and original achievements. But her poems are not so much "about" feminist issues as they are the charged embodiment of a profoundly female vision of the world.
As Anne Fogarty points out, there's an eclectic use of history (including art history), theory, and close reading by the essayists. On the theoretical side, Guinn Batten's use of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva intensifies her own sharp readings, while Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space is employed to good effect by Irene Gilsenan Nordin in her piece, Phenomenology and Poetics, in Ní Chuilleanáin's rooted, radical, and ramifying meditations. Closer to home, there's Thomas McCarthy's evocative and eloquent celebration of Ní Chuilleanáin's lifelong overt and covert entanglement with the city of her childhood, that "complex and evasive place" that is Cork city, which he calls her "psychic architecture" and "a locus of poetic energy". It is good, too, to see his testifying to the early influence on himself and his own generation of poets by this "poet of extraordinary integrity". The roster of essays is completed by a useful account of Ní Chuilleanáin's translations (from Irish, Italian, and Romanian), by Aidan O'Malley, and by Anne Mulhall's response to Cyphers, the magazine the poet has co-edited with her husband Macdara Woods, and Pearse Hutchinson, since 1975, highlighting its editorial commitment to the translation of poems from (often) minority languages. The concluding select bibliography is an indispensable starting point for further studies of the poet and her work. (The promised Selected Poems, due before too long from Gallery and Faber, should ensure that this work - "these decades and stations" as she calls it - will be renewed, as it should be, in the minds of many old and new readers.)
IN ITS ENTIRETY, then, this volume of essays forms an excellent introduction to the work of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, setting her where she belongs - at the very heart of contemporary Irish poetry, where her work stands as a model of self-aware but entirely unself-regarding integrity, originality, and artistic dedication. Her poems, as these essays repeatedly demonstrate, make their compelling presence felt at the intersection between (mostly Irish) history, culture, and imagination. Their contents and their manners show how strong poetry is always an alternate "history", an "unauthorised version", a perpetual critique of orthodoxy, a revelation of the real. It enables us, that is, to know ourselves better.
Eamon Grennan's most recent volume of poems is The Quick of It. A new collection, Out of Breath, is forthcoming
Irish University Review: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Edited by Anne Fogarty 289pp. €12