Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Followers (25)

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Born

in Cork, Ireland

November 28, 1942

Website

http://www.eileannichuilleanain.com/

Genre

Poetry

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Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the daughter of a writer and a professor who fought in the Irish War of Independence. She earned a BA and MA at University College Cork and also studied at Oxford University.

Ní Chuilleanáin uses transformative, sweeping metaphor to invert the structures of interior, natural, and spiritual realms. In a 2009 interview for Wake Forest University Press, Ní Chuilleanáin states, “The question I ask myself constantly is ‘is this real? Do I really believe this, do I really feel this?’ But that is a question I cannot answer except by trying again in a poem.” Awarding Ní Chuilleanáin the 2010 Griffin Prize, the judges noted, "She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the daughter of a writer and a professor who fought in the Irish War of Independence. She earned a BA and MA at University College Cork and also studied at Oxford University.

Ní Chuilleanáin uses transformative, sweeping metaphor to invert the structures of interior, natural, and spiritual realms. In a 2009 interview for Wake Forest University Press, Ní Chuilleanáin states, “The question I ask myself constantly is ‘is this real? Do I really believe this, do I really feel this?’ But that is a question I cannot answer except by trying again in a poem.” Awarding Ní Chuilleanáin the 2010 Griffin Prize, the judges noted, "She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes. […] Each poem is a world complete, and often they move between worlds, as in the beautiful ‘A Bridge between Two Counties.’ These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us."

Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; The Magdalene Sermon (1989), which was selected as one of the three best poetry volumes of the year by the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Book Prize Committee; Selected Poems (2009); and The Sun-fish (2010). She translated Ileana Malancioiu’s After the Raising of Lazarus (2005) and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001, co-translated with Medbh McGuckian). Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has been featured in several anthologies, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry, 1967-2000 (1999, edited by Peggy O’Brien).

Since 1975 she has edited the literary magazine Cyphers, and she has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. She has taught at Trinity College Dublin since 1966. With her husband, poet Macdara Woods, she divides her time between Ireland and Italy. ...more

Combine Editions
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s books

Average rating: 4.04 · 551 ratings · 63 reviews · 43 distinct works • Similar authors

	Selected Poems \| Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 3.98 avg rating — 62 ratings — published 2008 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Brazen Serpent really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 1994 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Sun-Fish 3.48 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 2010 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (Gallery books) 3.74 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 2000 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Boys of Bluehill really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 2015 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Mother House 4.20 avg rating — 15 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Second Voyage 3.62 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 1977 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems 4.18 avg rating — 11 ratings — published 1991 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Collected Poems \| Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 4.60 avg rating — 10 ratings — published 2021 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Map of the World 3.75 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 2023 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (?)

“
When you look out across the fields
And you both see the same star
Pitching its tent on the point of the steeple —
That is the time to set out on your journey,
With half a loaf and your mother’s blessing.

Leave behind the places that you knew:
All that you leave behind you will find once more,
You will find it in the stories;
The sleeping beauty in her high tower
With her talking cat asleep
Solid beside her feet — you will see her again.

When the cat wakes up he will speak in Irish and Russian
And every night he will tell you a different tale
About the firebird that stole the golden apples,
Gone every morning out of the emperor’s garden,
And about the King of Ireland’s Son and the Enchanter’s Daughter.

The story the cat does not know is the Book of Ruth
And I have no time to tell you how she fared
When she went out at night and she was afraid,
In the beginning of the barley harvest,
Or how she trusted to strangers and stood by her word:

You will have to trust me, she lived happily ever after.

”
― Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

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“When she came to the finger-post
She turned right and walked as far as the mountains.
Patches of snow lay under the thorny bush
That was blue with sloes. She filled her pockets.
The sloes piled into the hollows of her skirt.
The sunset wind blew cold against her belly
And light shrank between the branches
While her hands raked in the hard fruit.

The reindeer halted before her
And claimed her as his wife.
She rode home on his back without speaking,
Holding her rolled–up skirt,
Her free hand grasping the wide antlers
To keep her steady on the long ride.

[from the poem, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer]”
― Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

1 likes

“The scribe objects. You can’t put it like that,
I can’t write that. But the client
is a tough small woman forty years old.
She insists. She needs her letter
to open out full of pleated revolving silk
and the soft lobes of her ears
where she flaunts those thin silver wires.

She wants to tell her dream to the only one
who will get the drift. How she saw their children lying
every one dressed out in their simplest fears. They glowed,
the shape of their sentence outlined in sea green.
Among those beloved exiles
one sighed happy, as a curtain
lightened and the grammar changed, and the wall
showed pure white in the shape of a bird’s wing.

But when she whispered it to the scribe he frowned
and she saw she had got it wrong, she had come
to a place where they all spoke the one language:
it rose up before her like a quay wall
draped in sable weeds. He said,
You can’t put those words into your letter.
It will weigh too heavy, it will cost too much,
it will break the strap of the postman’s bag,
it will crack his collarbone. The bridges
are all so bad now, with that weight to shift
he’s bound to stumble. He’ll never make it alive.”
― Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Boys of Bluehill

tags: poem

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