About Irish Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Close Reading Irish Poetry
Join us for a short course, close reading the wonderful poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Sundays, 15 and 22 December 2024. Live online with Mariah Whelan, poet and lecturer. Course information here.
About Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork in 1942 and educated at University College Cork and the University of Oxford. For many years, she taught at Trinity College, Dublin. She was Ireland’s Professor of Poetry from 2016 to 2019.
She was shortlisted for the Forward Arts Foundation Prize in 2015. In an interview with the Foundation, she was asked ‘What advice would you give to anyone starting out in poetry today?’
She replied:
‘Read and keep reading, from every period; read in translation, translate yourself if you can, keep asking yourself ‘what does poetry do’? And never say more than you mean. And definitely never live with anyone who thinks it is your hobby. Spend time with real poets, though you will find that some of them too are obsessed by prizes and reputations – their presence is the only thing that will remind you that what you are doing is real. At the core of every poet is an immense arrogance and ego: this is a beast you have to feed even if your character is quite retiring and polite, because the poems won’t come if you starve him.’
Full interview here.
Read her poem ‘Dream Shine’ here.
Reviewer Carmen Bugan writes in the Harvard Review online, August 2021:
‘Exploring both nationality and cosmopolitanism, Ní Chuilleanáin’s perspective is guided by her work as a translator (her translations of Romanian women poets are some of the finest to date), and her deep knowledge of several European literary traditions. Womanhood is a constant preoccupation in her poetry; the figure of the woman is viewed through the lens of history, religion, landscape, and mythology.’
From ‘The Tree’
The house we left in nineteen forty-nine—
and who knows now how many children
have grown up in that same place since then—
the tree is alive that my father planted there.[ … ]
That’s where I learned how the world is
between men and women, my mother with us at home,
my father coming home, her asking him in Irish
’Have you any news?’
• Video of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reading her poem ’Small’ and ‘Celibates’.
