Published as Instead of a Shrine (2019), the three lectures Ní Chuilleanáin gave in that office offer much illumination into the ideas about poetry that stand behind her work. Engaging too was her energetic term as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016 to 2019. This has gone hand-in-hand with a subtle opening out to a more tangible sense of memory, history and place in her three most recent collections, The Sun-fish (2009), The Boys of Bluehill (2015), and The Mother House (2020). Mysterious journeys and sequestered spaces ever hint at something being expressed in terms of something else.Īwarded many prizes, from the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1973 through to the Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2020, the significance of Ní Chuilleanáin’s achievement has in recent years become more visible to an increasingly wide readership in Ireland and abroad.
A tall tree like a cat’s tail waited too.’ Hers is a poetic world of narrative lyrics, of stories already begun and yet to be finished.
But the poem then moves towards the unsettling intimations of folklore and fairytale, becoming something of a condensed parable: ‘and they pulled over / And waited in the shadow of a house.
In The Bend in the Road, from the 2001 collection The Girl who Married the Reindeer, we seem at first to be within a straightforward recollection of experience: ‘This is the place where the child / Felt sick in the car’. These are rooted not only in the breadth and depth of her interests, but also in her poetry’s distinctive combination of the concrete and the mysterious. Ní Chuilleanáin’s work undoubtedly poses challenges to its readers. Following on from the publication last year of her Collected Poems, though, the day-long event at Trinity will primarily focus on her poetry.Īcross nine collections, starting with the publication of Acts and Monuments in 1972, an authoritative and visionary poetic voice has been unfurled. Her scholarship includes pioneering research into a fascinating array of subjects, from the sermons of John Donne to the fiction of Maria Edgeworth to the Civil War prison diary of Joseph Campbell. Ní Chuilleanáin’s contribution to the life of Trinity, where she taught in the School of English for many years, has been extensive. On Saturday, a symposium at Trinity College Dublin will explore her work. In a ceremony on Thursday, President Michael D Higgins will confer the gold Torc, marking her election to the position of Saoi of Aosdána. The remarkable career of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin will be celebrated twice this week, ahead of her upcoming 80th birthday later this month.
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