[In the following excerpt, Henigan discusses Ní Chuilleanáin's technique and her ability to write about the positive and negative aspects of life.]

Like Líadan and Eileen O'Leary, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin is from Cork. She is the daughter of a professor of Irish and the prolific novelist Eilis Dillon. Although her poems are highly regarded in Ireland, American critics have been, at best, condescending. They complain that her poems are not distinctively Irish, that her syntax is elliptical to the point of obscurity, that her images are extreme or unsupported by rhetoric, or that her talent is buried in cliches.¹ But poet James Simmons, who included her work in his 1974 anthology Ten Irish Poets, wrote that “she has a lovely imagination with a sort of hard-boiled magic touch, manifesting on pages the wonder and horror of living.”²

Ní Chuilleanáin's poems are easy to like but not easy to grasp. A poem like “Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht …” evokes from some critics words such as “intercontinental” and “surreal.” The speaker, lacking food and drink, sits among ruins, beneath moon and stars, reading a book by candlelight. The language suggests a lone warrior in a scene of desolation, in the mood of Axel's Castle. He sleeps safely in a room through which bats fly:

Sheep stared at me when I woke.
Behind me the waves of darkness lay, the plague
Of mice, the plague of beetles
Crawling out of the spines of books,
Plague shadowing pale faces with clay
The disease of the moon gone astray.(3)

The poem begins, “Moon shining in silence of the night / The heaven being all full of stars.” Glossing this poem, Anthony Bradley says that though Lucina was the traditional goddess of childbirth, “Spenser also connects her with Diana, goddess of the moon.”⁴

In fact, the connection of the Roman goddess of birth labor with Diana was made by the Scot William Dunbar in a poem known as “The Antechrist,” which begins, “Lucina schynnyng in silence of the nicht, / The hevin being all ful of sternis bricht.”⁵ It is a satiric dream vision. After a nightmare in which Dame Fortune torments Dunbar with a vision of the coming of “the Antechrist” and the end of the world, he finds life not so bad after all, though he must be resigned to the fact that he will not prosper so long as two moons shine in the sky, since the natural one is the home of evil and the other is his alchemist enemy flying over the moon.

Ní Chuilleanáin's technique may sometimes mute her womanly concerns, but they are frequently evident: in “Going Back to Oxford” (p. 38):

Something to lose; it came with the equipment
Alongside the suicide pill and the dark blue card:
“I am a Catholic, please send for a priest”
With space below for next of kin.

In “Wash” (p. 52): “Wash man out of the earth. … Wash man out of the woman: / The strange sweat from her skin, the ashes from her hair.” In “Ransom” (p. 34) “The payment always has to be in kind”—the salmon of knowledge, fatal to women; the millet and barley grains she must separate; the bloody enchanted shirt she must wash. “Do not think him unkind, but begin / To search for the stuff he will accept.”

An untitled poem published in 1981 opens with these painful, understated lines:

She is fifty, and missing the breast
That grew in her thirteenth year
And was removed last month.(6)

Age, breast, year, and month emphasize not only the maiming of human flesh and psyche, but also loss of identity. The woman speaker shares our passive and denying euphemism, “was removed.” The illusion of freedom and the reality of chance are implicit when the two women “choose a random bar” at which they eat lunch. As the fifty-year-old woman stares at a man's face reflected and distorted in the curved surface of a metal urn, she tells her companion, “You can't see it from where you are.” This is the kind of “wonder and horror of living” Ní Chuilleanáin can make us see.

Notes

1. See, for example, “Ní Chuilleanáin, Eileán,” in Dictionary of Irish Literature, ed. Robert Hogan et al. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979); and Jay Parini, “The Celtic Center,” rev. of The Second Voyage, by Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Sewanee Review, 90 (1982), 631-32.

2. James Simmons, ed. Ten Irish Poets (Cheadle, Cheshire, UK: Carcanet Press, 1974), p. 11.

3. Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, The Second Voyage (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest Univ. Press, 1977), p. 3. Further references to this book appear in the text.

4. Anthony, Bradley, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 395.

5. James Kinsley, ed., The Poems of William Dunbar (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 159-60.

6. Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, “She is fifty …,” Concerning Poetry, 14 (Fall, 1981), 115.