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Reviews Although she has long been famous in Ireland, it is perhaps only in the last 10 years or so that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has begun to receive due recognition in Britain. Ní Chuilleanáin's work often eludes categories.
One of the great pleasures of reading Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin’s work comes from entering a world of such magnitude . . . Again and again, she manages to balance her highly developed set of emblems against the fragile, creaturely life she also honors. Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems may often read like partially occluded narratives, but they also respond to political and social occasions. In her two most recent volumes, The Girl who Married the Reindeer from 2001, and The Sun-fish, which has just been released in Ireland, Ní Chuilleanáin presents social and naturalistic settings and imagery with higher resolution than in the past. The mystery remains, but it’s tempered more often now by social immediacy. I love how effortlessly Ní Chuilleanáin collapses the usual divisions between intellect and imagination. (Her) tendency to counterpoint her enigmatic material with fuller narratives deepens in her newest volume, The Sun-fish. In 'On Lacking the Killer Instinct,' she writes of her father’s war experience. In 'The Polio Epidemic,' she delves into memories of her childhood in Cork City. The last poem in the book, 'The Copious Dark,' follows a woman whose nighttime city walks form a whole atmosphere of mind. And her personal impressions relate to her social urge, her desire to account for others. Ní Chuilleanáin in her steady and increasing success return(s) us to human scale. Perhaps this is why the most impressive poems often feel so estranging. They show us how profoundly unknown, though not necessarily unknowable, our actual lives may be.
It is N’ Chuillean‡inÕs skill in negotiating what are, essentially, different realms (which is always the business of metaphor, and metaphor is her beautifully handled, or played, instrument) that always catches and holds my attention, and it is a skill on plain and continuous view in this latest volume (a Poetry Book Society recommendation). . . ), she manages, as her best poems always manage, to embody mystery thatÕs been palpably encountered and, in a language of concrete presence, expressed. Again and again, that is, she creates small, clear windows into a fully realized narrative world, . . . one charged all of a sudden by something weÕd have to call visionary. . . The dominant impression is of poems that are, like the sun-fish themselves, ÒSuddenly present, a visitationÓ Ð all composed in a tone that is equal parts knowledge, wisdom, at times a quiet ferocity, and something like warm yet detached compassion. Like other N’ Chuillean‡in volumes, this one resembles, with no hint of piety, a book of prayers Ð secular and sacred at once, and curiously consoling in their depths of spiritual reserve. ÒHow as a child she watched without moving,Ó she says in one poem. It is that patience married to that intensity, that utterly absorbed attention that drives these poems, poems that make Sun-Fish yet another indispensable N’ Chuillean‡in collection.
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