Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, renowned poet, scholar, translator, and editor, turned 80 last month. Gallery Press has published an anthology of 50 poems, selected by a host of writers, to celebrate the event. A poem for every year of her collaboration with the publishing house. The choices are explained in short essays, which anthologist Charlotte Brooke once called “advertisements”.
While many of the essayists are Irish, the book also includes choices by high-profile poets from the Anglosphere – Sasha Dugdale, Lavinia Greenlaw, Karen Solie and Rosanna Warren. Their presence in the volume, the many awards Ní Chuilleanáin has won, and the multiple translations of her work, are an indication of the universality of her writing and the esteem in which her poetry is held outside of Ireland.
Second Voyages is organised chronologically. The book offers a generous selection from her nine published collections and concludes with a final uncollected poem. The volume might be seen as a version of “Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s greatest hits”. Those familiar with her work will delight in discussing the choices made, remarking on how some collections seem to be more popular than others; others may quibble as to why certain favourites (such as Gloss/Clós/Glas or To Niall Woods and Xenia Ostrovskaia) are not included.
The anthology also contains many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s occasional poems, all remarkable for their engagement and prescience
Some essays admire Ní Chuilleanáin’s craft. This is apparent in Tara Bergin’s essay on Wash. In it Bergin explores rhythm and tone, explaining how Ní Chuilleanáin wrote the poem, offering a commentary that is both learned and plain speaking, a characteristic common to all the essays in the book. Elsewhere, Bernard O’Donoghue chooses the poem Fireman’s Lift. He reminds us that this poem, like so much of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, functions in an indirect manner, “often holding back a precise sense, which is left to dawn slowly despite the apparent solidity of her images”.
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Colm Tóibín’s comments on The Architectural Metaphor suggest that the attraction of the poem lies in its ambiguity, “To spell it out would be to ruin the spell”. Other writers respond to the themes that recur in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry – Martina Evans chooses Woman Shoeing a Horse, reminding us that female figures are central in the work; her remark “pure cinema with a double edge” (also an apt description of Evans’s own poems) focuses on the time-travelling storytelling that is central to Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetics.
The anthology also contains many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s occasional poems, all remarkable for their engagement and prescience. They include The Polio Epidemic (chosen by Olivia O’Leary) remembering the polio epidemic in 1950s Cork, Translations (chosen by Anne Enright) marking the reburial of the women who worked in the Magdalene laundries; Bessboro (chosen by Eleanor Hooker) exploring a Cork landmark, now forever associated with the Mother and Baby Homes. As Hooker says, when Ní Chuilleanán “published this extraordinary poem in 2001 she had access only to the reputation and warnings about Bessboro”.
As well as poems commemorating events of national significance, the book offers many glimpses of private loss, where Ní Chuilleanáin inscribes the memory of her family into her work, such as J’ai Mal à Nos Dents (chosen by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh), which remembers her aunt, or On Lacking the Killer Instinct (chosen by Gerard Smyth).
The latter poem is a “storytelling poem” that relates to the experience of her father Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, in the War of Independence. Yet, as Paul Muldoon reminds us in the book’s first essay that, when it comes to the matter of Ireland, private and public are intertwined in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work.
This personal anthology of her poems offers the readers the chance to be changed 50 times over
The anthology also contains some bold choices, Aingeal Clare’s selection of The Cloister of Bones, identifies Oíche Nollaig na mBan by Seán Ó Ríordáin as a key reference; Vona Groarke chooses the bewitching In Her Other Ireland and dwells on the fact that you don’t have to entirely understand a poem to love it. Aifric MacAodha selects a prose poem in Irish Ag Stánadh Amach that has been auto-translated by Ní Chuilleanáin as Gazing Out. In War Time, Maria Johnston pays tribute to the importance of music for Ní Chuilleanáin, both thematically and formally.
Ní Chuilleanáin herself has said of reading a poem, “You go into a space and something has to have changed by the time you come out of it. I think that is sort of a description of a poem”. This personal anthology of her poems offers the readers the chance to be changed 50 times over. Think of it as the annual that should be in every reader’s stocking this Christmas.
