Eilean Ni Chuilleanain Books

The Mother House is rich with images of orphans, exiles, migrants, decay, destruction, famine, disaster, the cloistered, the drowned, the marginalized, as well as disappearance and memory, music and loss. The poems speak of histories, in Ireland and elsewhere, as allegories of our age. Yet, the poetic is not offered as a salvo or a salve, for as the poet questions, "We made the long journey // to deliver the gesture, but who has noticed us?" Ní Chuilleanain nevertheless proves that when the mirror is held at the right angle, the past can shed a telling light upon the present, observing with great acumen, "it was like history, held there / in view of another lifetime." In this remarkable volume, art and literature reflect human suffering and survival across many frontiers.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's Collected Poems gathers nine collections of poetry, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The 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.