Instead of a Shrine

by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is one of contemporary Ireland’s most beloved poets. Her debut collection won the prestigious Patrick Kavanaugh Poetry Award, her poems are included on the final exam taken by all Irish secondary school students, and, in 2016 she was appointed the Ireland Professor of Poetry by Irish president Michael D. Higgins. It is this last honor that forms the backbone of Instead of a Shrine , the seventh installment in University College Dublin Press’s Poet’s Chair series. The three essays collected in this book examine a diverse slate of poetry-related topics and explore the forces that affect the work of every practicing poet. The first piece pays tribute to the Irish poet and translator Pearse Hutchinson (1927–2012), a valued friend and colleague of Ní Chuilleanáin’s, as well as to the languages he used and the impact they had even on readers that did not fully understand them. The second looks at the often disparaging treatment of poets in fiction, ranging from P. G. Wodehouse to Flann O’Brien. In the book’s final essay, Ní Chuilleanáin returns to her lifelong academic interest in the poetry of seventeenth-century England and calls on the work of poets as diverse as Bishop Henry King, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Kinsella to explore poetry’s relation to the ceremonies surrounding death. Elegantly designed and masterfully written, Instead of a Shrine offers a unique opportunity to return to—or begin engaging with—the dynamic world of poetry via the intellect of one of Ireland’s modern masters.
 

120 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 2020

About the author

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.