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Selected Poems
The patient, unhurried assembly of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s first collection resulted in an uncommonly accomplished debut. Poems from Acts and Monuments (1972) have already revealed their lasting power. In this timely retrospective they join generous selections from each of her subsequent books down to The Girl who Married the Reindeer (2001).
In the words of Ruth Padel (Financial Times) ‘Her eerie blend of the legendary and modern sounds utterly natural. A new book from her is a major event.’
In the words of Ruth Padel (Financial Times) ‘Her eerie blend of the legendary and modern sounds utterly natural. A new book from her is a major event.’
120 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
8 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
43 books25 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 6, 2025
I would love Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry so much more if I could begin to understand it beyond a mere gist. The imagery is certainly stunning and intriguing, and the handling of language very impressive, but too often I'm at a loss as to what the poem is saying & what I should make of it. There is just so much ambiguity, so many references that elude me entirely - for instance, the poems with biographical tint. Don't get me wrong, you can absolutely enjoy the poems on their own and bask in that 'negative capability' they perform, but it is a bit like an outsider looking in.
A certain degree of mystery is poetry's strongest asset (or one of) but I fear this is too much. I feel left out, helpless, baffled, desperately looking for a foothold into the world of the poem, and most of the time I can't quite find any. This feeling of frustration can compound when reading Ní Chuilleanáin's poems back to back, so that by the end I find myself disengaged and fatigued. Because of how elliptical they are, it's unlikely many of these poems will stay with me for long beyond isolated images and snatches. Still, there is much to admire in here, or love - if you can fully love something you don't understand.
A certain degree of mystery is poetry's strongest asset (or one of) but I fear this is too much. I feel left out, helpless, baffled, desperately looking for a foothold into the world of the poem, and most of the time I can't quite find any. This feeling of frustration can compound when reading Ní Chuilleanáin's poems back to back, so that by the end I find myself disengaged and fatigued. Because of how elliptical they are, it's unlikely many of these poems will stay with me for long beyond isolated images and snatches. Still, there is much to admire in here, or love - if you can fully love something you don't understand.
June 22, 2009
Edited by Peter Fallon, this selection of poems comes from 6 books published over a period of 29 years, roughly one book every five years. Chuilleanáin was 30 when she first published Acts and Monuments in 1972, and 59 when she published The Girl who Married the Reindeer in 2001. In the first book she imagines herself reading “in a ruin/ By a sour candle” and compares the future death of a lover to a plane crash in which
You will be scattered like wreckage,
The pieces every one a different shape
Will spin and lodge in the hearts
Of all who love you.
In the last book death has come, and taken away people the poet loved. “Agnes Bernelle, 1923-1999” is a moving elegy that compares, with considerable tact, the departed with a spider “that makes her own centre every day,/ Catching brilliantly the light of autumn.”
Besides the fictions and facts of death, the poems also say life is a journey, traveling often by water. Born in Cork, Ireland, Chuilleanáin traveled to Oxford for her studies, and, later, moved to Dublin, where she teaches at Trinity College. So there are poems in this Selected about the journey back home, both literal and metaphorical. Odysseus appears twice, once in the first book, then in the second, Site of Ambush.
When the poet imagines herself the traveler, she also imagines traveling with her, leading her, the figure of a pilot. “I Saw the Islands in a Ring All Round Me” sees the pilot as “the pivot/ In the middle of a clockface.” The pilot is, possibly, many persons—lover, husband, father, and God—but he is always envisioned as male. There are tender love poems here, to a husband who is also a poet (Macdara Woods), and to a father, an academic, who was the poet’s intellectual light. The poems do not address God explicitly but he is felt behind every him.
When the woman figure is not a traveler, guided by a male pilot, she is envisioned as a lifeless body brought to life upon the action or discovery of a man. “Pygmalion’s Image” focuses on the coming to life of the stone image lying in the ferns, “a green leaf of language” twisting out of her mouth, but the title, especially in its possessive form, reminds us of the absent life-giver. “Permafrost Woman” should be read together with Seamus Heaney’s bog woman. “A Voice” also imagines a man discovering an ancient mutilated corpse of a woman. These middle poems about lifeless women are of a piece with the earlier “The Absent Girl.” This poet has a deep and abiding sense of, not the plenitude, but the blankness of life. The blank page is a recurring metaphor, a blankness that needs recurrent filling in.
When Chuilleanáin imagines women who take charge of their lives, she thinks of saints. Saint Margaret of Cortona who was “neither maiden, widow nor wife.” Saint Mary Madgalene preaching at Marseilles. These women are wonderfully independent, somewhat indifferent and mysterious to the religious establishment. Even more mysterious to men is the figure of the Virgin Mary. In “Our Lady of Youghal,” the wooden image is discovered on the beach by yet another of Chuilleanáin’s men, a lay brother. As he touches the image, “blessing himself in the entry,” the wooden image reveals itself to him in a sexual and spiritual climax,
The virgin’s almond shrine, its ivory lids parting
Behind lids of gold, bursting out of the wood.
In the marvelous repetition of “lids,” the opening of sex is equated with the opening of sight. “Lids” is so much more intimate than gates, ivory or horn, so much more embodied.
My favorite poem of this Selected is another Mary poem. In “Fireman’s Lift,” the speaker, with her lover-husband, looks at a painting of the Virgin’s ascension, in “the big tree of the cupola.”
She sees the Virgin spiraling to heaven, but she focuses on the “teams of angelic arms” that raise her.
This is what love sees, that angle:
The crick in the branch loaded with fruit,
A jaw defining itself, a shoulder yoked,
The back making itself a roof
The legs a bridge, the hands
A crane and a cradle.
Spiritual transcendence depends on bodily labors. A woman is raised up on the backs of men. The idea is so at odds with contemporary feminist ideas of sisterhood that it must constitute a challenge to those ideas. The mention of fruit recalls Eve's first disobedience, which the Virgin, in her obedience to God, now transcends. How to read this poet? Is she trapped in the male-dominated Irish Catholic and poetic traditions? Or is she a corrective to some of the excesses of radical feminism?
The poems must be their own justification. And this poem, observant, humane, and finally radiant, convinces me that those traditions are not so much deadwood of the past to be discarded, but living trees for some poet’s shelter. Marie Howe, Marie Ponsot, and now, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Committed to her religious and poetic traditions, Chuilleanáin finds a clearing in their woods for singing her own songs.
You will be scattered like wreckage,
The pieces every one a different shape
Will spin and lodge in the hearts
Of all who love you.
In the last book death has come, and taken away people the poet loved. “Agnes Bernelle, 1923-1999” is a moving elegy that compares, with considerable tact, the departed with a spider “that makes her own centre every day,/ Catching brilliantly the light of autumn.”
Besides the fictions and facts of death, the poems also say life is a journey, traveling often by water. Born in Cork, Ireland, Chuilleanáin traveled to Oxford for her studies, and, later, moved to Dublin, where she teaches at Trinity College. So there are poems in this Selected about the journey back home, both literal and metaphorical. Odysseus appears twice, once in the first book, then in the second, Site of Ambush.
When the poet imagines herself the traveler, she also imagines traveling with her, leading her, the figure of a pilot. “I Saw the Islands in a Ring All Round Me” sees the pilot as “the pivot/ In the middle of a clockface.” The pilot is, possibly, many persons—lover, husband, father, and God—but he is always envisioned as male. There are tender love poems here, to a husband who is also a poet (Macdara Woods), and to a father, an academic, who was the poet’s intellectual light. The poems do not address God explicitly but he is felt behind every him.
When the woman figure is not a traveler, guided by a male pilot, she is envisioned as a lifeless body brought to life upon the action or discovery of a man. “Pygmalion’s Image” focuses on the coming to life of the stone image lying in the ferns, “a green leaf of language” twisting out of her mouth, but the title, especially in its possessive form, reminds us of the absent life-giver. “Permafrost Woman” should be read together with Seamus Heaney’s bog woman. “A Voice” also imagines a man discovering an ancient mutilated corpse of a woman. These middle poems about lifeless women are of a piece with the earlier “The Absent Girl.” This poet has a deep and abiding sense of, not the plenitude, but the blankness of life. The blank page is a recurring metaphor, a blankness that needs recurrent filling in.
When Chuilleanáin imagines women who take charge of their lives, she thinks of saints. Saint Margaret of Cortona who was “neither maiden, widow nor wife.” Saint Mary Madgalene preaching at Marseilles. These women are wonderfully independent, somewhat indifferent and mysterious to the religious establishment. Even more mysterious to men is the figure of the Virgin Mary. In “Our Lady of Youghal,” the wooden image is discovered on the beach by yet another of Chuilleanáin’s men, a lay brother. As he touches the image, “blessing himself in the entry,” the wooden image reveals itself to him in a sexual and spiritual climax,
The virgin’s almond shrine, its ivory lids parting
Behind lids of gold, bursting out of the wood.
In the marvelous repetition of “lids,” the opening of sex is equated with the opening of sight. “Lids” is so much more intimate than gates, ivory or horn, so much more embodied.
My favorite poem of this Selected is another Mary poem. In “Fireman’s Lift,” the speaker, with her lover-husband, looks at a painting of the Virgin’s ascension, in “the big tree of the cupola.”
She sees the Virgin spiraling to heaven, but she focuses on the “teams of angelic arms” that raise her.
This is what love sees, that angle:
The crick in the branch loaded with fruit,
A jaw defining itself, a shoulder yoked,
The back making itself a roof
The legs a bridge, the hands
A crane and a cradle.
Spiritual transcendence depends on bodily labors. A woman is raised up on the backs of men. The idea is so at odds with contemporary feminist ideas of sisterhood that it must constitute a challenge to those ideas. The mention of fruit recalls Eve's first disobedience, which the Virgin, in her obedience to God, now transcends. How to read this poet? Is she trapped in the male-dominated Irish Catholic and poetic traditions? Or is she a corrective to some of the excesses of radical feminism?
The poems must be their own justification. And this poem, observant, humane, and finally radiant, convinces me that those traditions are not so much deadwood of the past to be discarded, but living trees for some poet’s shelter. Marie Howe, Marie Ponsot, and now, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Committed to her religious and poetic traditions, Chuilleanáin finds a clearing in their woods for singing her own songs.
November 18, 2018
Such a charming collection, full of character.
September 26, 2019
The best of this collection astonishes. Quite a lot went over my head. Some of the deliberate repetitions eluded me.
October 15, 2013
Difficult, elliptical, rebarbative with vision and detail. I liked what I got, though confess that at times I got very little. A poet to trust and worth returning to.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews