Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, _The Mother House_

 I WAS VERY excited to see that Ní Chuilleanáin's collected poems were coming out this year, news that spurred me to get to this, her most recent collection, which came out in the USA last year.

Ní Chuilleanáin has never been the kind of poet given to including notes on her poems, so I resorted to Wikipedia to learn that Nano Nagle, the dedicatee of the volume's first poem, "was a pioneer of Catholic education in Ireland despite legal prohibitions. She founded the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as the Presentation Sisters, now a worldwide teaching order." The order was founded in Cork, where Ní Chuilleanáin grew up, so the "mother house" of the order is probably in Cork..but the "mother house" in the book's title poem seems to be in France, and the Presentation Sisters seem not to be active in France. Hmm.

So let's say Ní Chuilleanáin's long-standing interest in nuns continues and leave it at that for now.

As has also long been the case, she is sparing in her use of the first person singular, even when writing (apparently) of her grandchildren ("On the Move"). Her republican roots can sometimes be glimpsed ("Kilmainham," "For James Connolly"), and I am happy to report that she is still likely to round a poem off with an alarming but unexplained detail, as in "A Journey":

           I looked

again at the deep wound in my arm;

it was all cleaned and covered up,

so as not to frighten the children.

Well, someone is looking out for the sensibilities of the children, at least, though I as reader was badly rattled. Deep wound? Shouldn't we get a story about that hitherto-unmentioned wound? Does it have anything to do with roadblock noted a few lines earlier? Where did this journey start, and where does it end? 

The beauty of this and so many other Ní Chuilleanáin poems is that she isn't going to tell you, She is one of the great poets of the unsaid.