Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has grown in popularity among students since her introduction to the course in 2015. Many of her poems on the course explore events from Irish history like Cromwell’s invasion, the era of Penal Laws and the War of Independence. Other themes that feature in her poetry include: memory, the inevitability of death, mythology and folklore, spirituality, love and nature.

She is constantly making connections between the past and the present in her poems. ‘The Bend in the Road’ is a poem about memory and nostalgia for the past. It recounts a tale of a child getting sick on a journey with the whole family and how the location, that ‘bend in the road’, becomes synonymous with that event. The poet realises that our surroundings, our ‘present’ is filled with the memories of our loved ones even if they have passed away: “This is the place of their presence: in the tree, in the air.”

STYLE:

Her poetic style is distinctive and there are some key elements that feature across the poetry on the Leaving Cert course. Firstly, her language is deceptively simple and often colloquial: “Over twelve years it has become the place/ Where you were sick one day on the way to the lake.’ Aside from her translation of Kilcash she avoids traditional forms of metre and rhyme instead writing in a ‘richly cadenced’ free verse full of assonance and half-rhyme: ‘Plague shadowing pale faces with clay.’ With the careful arrangement of sounds she manipulates the atmosphere, tone and pace of her poems.

Secondly her poems often originate in a particular moment in time or a fragment of a story. From this moment links are made to other memories or ideas and the poems grow in an organic, natural way if not always logically. ‘On Lacking the Killer Instinct’ demonstrates the process of memory very clearly. One thought calls forth a memory and then sparks off another and another. The dramatic photo of a hare being chased by greyhounds in the newspaper reminds the poet of an encounter with a hare on the road near the hospital where her father was dying. She then thinks of her father as a young man, running from the enemy in the ‘Irish War of Independence’ and his ‘clever’/crazy idea to chance an ‘open kitchen door’, a risk that saved his life.

Thirdly she uses rich, visual imagery to draw the reader into her world and see what she is seeing. She often sets up strong contrasts for dramatic effect, for example in ‘Street’:

‘He fell in love with the butcher’s daughter When he saw her passing by in her white trousers Dangling a knife on a ring at her belt. He stared at the dark shining drops on the paving-stones.’

She also often uses concrete images to represent abstract ideas and emotions, for example from ‘Death and Engines’, ‘Cornered in the angle where/Time and life like a knife and fork/ Cross.’ This use of figurative language helps the reader to explore these issues along with the poet.

Finally her poems are enigmatic and can be hard for the reader to crack. She herself owns up to being ‘very aware of the fact that [her] poetry is oblique and obscure.’ ‘Street’ demonstrates this trait giving us but a fragment of detail to go on. The ambiguity puts the onus on the reader to think about the images and the ideas she presents to them and to make up their own minds. Fascinating classroom debates can erupt over whether the male character in ‘Street’ is an innocent figure who’s genuinely in love or, as many students argue, a creepy stalker! As one reads and rereads her poems one uncovers layer after layer of different meanings and associations. I would advise students to approach with an open mind and to trust their own instincts in assessing and appreciating her poems.

SHE USES RICH, VISUAL IMAGERY TO DRAW THE READER INTO HER WORLD