Notes

I agree with this statement about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry. Ní Chuilleanáin’s treatment of memory, loss, transience, relationships and unspoken voices is demanding but ultimately very rewarding. The poet is very knowledgeable in art, myth, history and nature and these elements inform her formidable style. Her poetry demands multiple readings. Critic Stephen Burt has suggested that Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is ‘drawn to visionary experience, yet alert to domestic and urban detail, she looks at once inward to things of the spirit and outward to coastlines’, and this is evident in ‘Fireman’s Lift’, ‘Death and Engines’, ‘Translation’ and ‘Following’. Seamus Heaney has said that Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry ‘sees things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light.’ Her poems say important things about the human condition in a unique and absorbing way.

The poem ‘Fireman’s Lift’ is not only a meditation on the compelling mystery of Renaissance art, but ultimately a fascinating treatment of Ní Chuilleannáin’s mother’s death. The dramatic setting of viewing Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin in a cathedral in Parma, a place the poet visited with her mother, becomes transformed by the poet into a comment on love and the mystery of life and death. The poet has said the aspect that affected her most about the fresco was the bodily effort and bodily weight that brings the Virgin figure to an unknowable place of mystery.

Ní Chuilleanáin captures the wonder of the setting as she and her mother look up to where ‘the church splits wide-open’. This dramatic image captures the otherworldly nature of the scene. It is filled with ‘celestial choirs, the fall-out of brightness’. The light imagery is continued throughout the poem as the ‘light / melted’ and the angels' heads ‘reflect on’ the Virgin’s ‘fair face’. The poet places emphasis on particular verbs in the poem to demonstrate the huge effort that is needed to bring the Virgin to heaven. She is ‘hauled up in stages’; the angels are seen ‘heaving’ and ‘supporting’, which underlines the significance of the ascension. The poet turns to the work of the painter demonstrating how she can move within and without the painting to capture the miracle of such a work of art and the miracle of what is being portrayed in the fresco. The artistic reference here is a unique attempt to understand the difficult task at hand. ‘We stepped / back as the painter longed to’. To the artist, the fresco is an act of love – ‘this is what love sees, that angle’ – and this can be compared with the poem itself as Ní Chuilleanáin has stepped back into memory to write a poem that is a demonstration of love for her mother. The poet and the artist are connected at this point in creative endeavours as they ‘saw the work entire’.

The poem becomes more personal as the focus on the movement of the body moves to the support that is given to it and the language narrows to the supportive role of the angels. At this point the comparison between the angels and the nurses who cared for the poet’s mother is most evident in the physical description of the Virgin’s Assumption into heaven. The angels’ ‘hands / A crane and a cradle’ support her carefully. The use of the word ‘cradle’ here suggesting a rebirth as the Virgin moves into heaven and also alludes to the way in which the child often takes care of the parent in their last days. The emphasis here is on the weight and stress of the body as ‘the muscles clung and shifted...under her weight’. However, there is a sense that the poet’s mother, like the Virgin, has surrendered to her spiritual ascension; she ‘passed through their hands’ to go beyond the ‘edge of the cloud’.

The poem is essentially a response to the death of the poet’s mother through the recreation of an intense artistic experience, where the dramatic setting and artistic detail capture the profound personal experience without alluding to it directly, which makes it a challenging read.

The personal becomes profound again in the poem ‘Death and Engines’ as the poet contemplates the inevitability of life and death following the death of her father. The poet does not deal directly with his death but instead, by using a first and second person narrative, the reader is given an insight into the poet’s thoughts on the nature of death and beyond. Although the poem is a lyric poem, it is detached in tone and unsentimental, which is unusual for a lyric poem.

The poet employs the first person plural narrative in the first and second stanzas, which brings the reader into the personal experience of seeing the remnants of a crashed plane. ‘We came down above the houses’ and ‘when we faced again’ give an immediacy to the experience. The narrative voice changes in stanza three to the second person narrative, which gives the speaker a tone of certainty as she ruminates on the idea that ‘soon you will need wings of your own’ when the ‘lifeline in your palm / Breaks’. This suggests that the poet is fatalistic about death but also that she believes in something after life. The second person narrative is continued throughout the remainder of the poem as the poet follows through with the idea that death is an inevitability of life, which will ‘fail you some time’ and ‘you will find yourself alone’ where ‘you will be scattered like wreckage’. These images underscore the loss of control in life much like putting one’s life into the hands of a ‘lonely pilot’ on an airplane journey. However, the poet finds that while there is no escaping death and no matter ‘how light your death is’, there is something transformative in the event as every person will be remembered as ‘a different shape’ in ‘the hearts / of all who love you’. This is a comforting image for the poet in the wake of her father’s death but also speaks to a profound belief in the resilience of the human spirit.

The poet’s use of contrast in this poem is quite striking and enhances the thematic exploration of life contrasted with death. The ‘stiff curve’ of flight is contrasted with the ‘edge of the Paris airport’, suggesting something is wrong. The image is a dissonant one. The ‘empty tunnel’ is ‘black / On the snow’; the contrast between the burnt out plane and the purity of the snow indicates the fragility of life and how it can be ended in an instant. The eerie silence as the poet descends contrasts with the imagined panic of the passengers on the plane that crashed. That they are not mentioned underlines the potential horror of this scene. The contrast of ‘time’ and ‘life’ ‘like a knife and fork / cross’ underscores the poet’s belief in the inevitability of death like the ‘curve’ of the airplane meeting the ‘straight skyline’. It is a fact of life and death. The poem is a unique exploration of the universal theme awaiting us all.

‘Following’ is another of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, which is challenging to unravel but ultimately reveals itself to be a poem of universal significance told in an extraordinary way. The poem is about memory and loss and is essentially an attempt on behalf of the poet to recreate her father from memory. The poem appeals to the imagination, as it weaves together a narrative of the real and the supernatural as a young girl journeys through a busy Irish fair. Past and present are interwoven as a continuous present. The fair itself is vividly evoked through alliteration, simile and metaphor. The men are ‘beasts packed solid as books’ with ‘a block of belly, a back like a mountain’. The girl finds herself in a gothic, supernatural world as if like a dream sequence. The bog is ‘shivering’ ‘by starlight’, and the ground is ‘forested with gesturing trunks’. The world is alive as the young girl follows the ‘dead corpse’, most likely her father through this strange place.

The poet creates this psychic landscape as a place for her to reconnect with her father who told her the folktales that she draws upon in this poem. The young girl comes to her father ‘in a library where the light is clean’. The lines here are more ordered and less oblique as is the description of the father, in contrast to the world they have passed through and the people in it. The library is a place for the poet to reconnect with her father who was a professor and comfortable in a library. In that library the books contain ‘three drops / of her heart’s blood’, a suggestion that to reconnect with her father she must carry out a task with blood, which is seen to have mystical and powerful restorative qualities in folk and fairy tales. The last lines of the poem allude to how memories of her father can grow from her reading of the books that she associates with him. Like flowers, the memories cannot be contained but instead ‘push the bindings apart’.

Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is not explicitly personal or intimate, which can make it challenging to read. However, a poem like ‘Translation’ highlights that her poetry is not without emotion. It is a powerful expression of intent, which gives voice to the voiceless and unnamed women of the Magdalene laundries. The poem does not offer a solution; it only demands that the women be acknowledged.

The poem gives a voice to the women who were ‘blinded and bleached out’ of history, as if they were not allowed to see the world nor the world to see them. The word ‘bleach’ alludes to the scrubbing away of a stain, as if the women were a stain on Irish society because of their transgressions. The lives of the women in the laundry are contrasted with the gaiety of youth. The ‘steam’ of the laundry dances and giggles, instead of the women.

The picture of life at the laundry is extremely negative as only the ‘edges of words’, their cries for help can be heard. Instead they have become eroded by the daily grind of work ‘like rotten teeth / of soap’, their grasp of clothes ‘melted’ by the scalding water. The poet asks for a better end for the women in the simple line ‘Assist them now’; it is prayer-like. This is an ironic line as it was the bastions of the Catholic Church that failed the women in the past.

Interestingly the poet gives voice to a nun who can perhaps be seen as a victim of sorts in the situation. The poem switches to the first person narrative in the sixth stanza, as the nun seeks to explain how ‘a parasite that grew in me’ saw her abuse her power and in turn abuse the women. Her cry is shrill, ‘sharp as an infant’s cry’ and cannot be ignored unlike the women and their infants. She too had a ‘temporary name’ like the Magdalene women as nuns traditionally took saint’s names. She was ‘washed clean of idiom’, which suggests that she was forced to adopt the ways of the nuns when she entered her convent and a ‘spell’ was cast, which ultimately saw her abuse the authority she had. There is no plea to assist the nun with her guilt, only a recognition that a cloud remains over the nun’s actions and ultimately Irish society.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin deals with all elements of the human condition in her poetry, employing striking imagery, detached and revolving narrative voices and unique settings, informed by art, history and myth. However, the distance she keeps from her subject matter means it is often necessary to come back to her poetry more than once. Ultimately her poetry is challenging but also very rewarding.