Description
There is something second sighted, as it were, about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, by which I don’t mean that she has any prophetic afflatus, more that her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greetings. — Seamus Heaney
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems is a book of singular beauty and uncommon cohesion. It contains work from more than fifty years and nine collections and includes new, previously unpublished poems. For all the serenity of their surfaces a core of historical concern permeates her lines. Often she attends to marginalized or solitary figures and embraces multiple journeys which transport her readers to the dramas of hinted narratives. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s art is a wonder. As Maria Johnston wrote in Poetry Ireland Review, ‘One could spend one’s whole life reading Ní Chuilleanáin’s oceanic oeuvre and still feel that one has only sailed on the surface of this fugitive poet’s unending, elaborate, and endlessly transformative mysteries.’