Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, _The Boys of Bluehill_

 FOR A FEW months late in the 1990s I was immersed in Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Magdalene Sermon (1989) and The Brazen Serpent (1994) because I was writing an article about her. I was living in those poems.

 I read The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001) and The Sun-fish (2009) when they came out and liked them— Ní Chuilleanáin is amazingly consistent—but not with the same obsessive attention, I have to admit, since I had said what I had to say and was not planning on writing more about her.

I bought this one, The Boys of Bluehill, when it came out in 2015 but did not get around to it right away...and now it’s been five years, and I learn Ní Chuilleanáin had new book out in 2019 (The Mother House) that I did not even know about.

There was something in those two books, Magdalene Sermon and Brazen Serpent, that I just absolutely had to figure out, explain to myself, and then try to describe for other people. I felt no such urgency with the subsequent books, though. And now Ní Chuilleanáin has had a new book out for going on two years without my knowing it. And I have, if anything, been reading more poetry than I was in the 1990s, by no means less. I feel disappointed in myself.

Her poetry has not changed, or not a great deal, and certainly not for the worse. The Boys of Bluehill may be a little more sombre, a little grayer than the earlier books, but her distinctive notes are all there. Ní Chuilleanáin poems work by holding a lot back, the details of the poem suggesting a narrative of which the bigger and more grievous facts remain unstated, but still have all their weight. One poem ends, “he can see the chair, and the red rug, the coloured // covers of the magazine, and everything that followed.” We do not know what followed—but you feel all of what happened, even without knowing what it was.  Or try this: “while the child you forgot to fetch from school / goes alone on dark bus journeys along the boulevards.” Feel that. And we don’t even know what was going on that led to the forgetting.

Ní Chuilleanáin‘s manner is very much what it was, then, maybe stronger and leaner, and her concerns have been consistent as well: art, music, religion, the church, loyalty and betrayal, the work of women and men’s ways of ignoring it. I wonder if the catastrophic hits the authority of the Irish Catholic Church has taken in the last ten years have something to do with the dry-ice anger under the surface of some of these poems.

Ní Chuilleanáin has not changed so very much—she remains a powerful poet, and either Muldoon or she is the greatest living Irish poet. I’m different, somehow. But not in any way I understand.