Collected Poems | Eilan N Chuilleanin [Paperback]

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’sCollected Poemsgathers nine collections of poetry, fromActs and Monuments(1972) toThe Mother House(2020), as well as new poems and translations. Her poetry is scrupulously controlled but also continuously startling, using the language of history, religion, landscape, and myth. Travelers, pilgrims, and women—especially the veiled subject of the nun—remind us of our deepest inner sanctum with its litany of spiritual truths, human fears, and needs. These images also catalogue the importance of the ordinary and the domestic as metaphors for human experiences and emotions. Ní Chuilleanáin allows those who have been silenced by history to surface in art as surreal but living presences. It is now unquestionably apparent that she is one the major poets in contemporary Ireland.“A poet of light and illuminations, of cloistered study and wide European travel, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is one of the most important Irish poets to emerge in the post-Yeats, post-Kavanagh era. Her career as poet has been exemplary and brilliant, creating for us an Irish world saturated with learning and firm in its sense of history, womanhood, and motherhood. Her work is crafted with shrewd precision, mindful of the possibilities of learning but with a heightened awareness of love, of loss, of family frailty and fracture. Those of us who were young when she published her spectacular early books,Acts and MonumentsandCork, were kept eternally young by the mesmeric effect of her later work inThe Sun-fishandThe Boys of Bluehill. Lyrical, gifted, multi-lingual, she is a poet of Europe as well as an Irish poet. As the poems in this greatCollectednow show us, as well as being a poet of history she is also a poet for the present, anxious moment. The knowledge her work contains is urgent human knowledge, exquisite in its feeling and accomplished in its l“p