EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN: FORMAT, TACTICS, AND PERSONAL NIMBLENESS

NADIA QARAQRA, 

18, Nov 2016

I

n ten days exactly from today, poetry will celebrate the 74th birthday of a great Irish canon; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, who like fine wine, only grows better with time. Wishing her much more years of production of brilliant poetry and happiness with her family. The thought of a strong and expressive female poet married to another, brought me back to Sylvia Plath every time. I could read the heartache and feel the distress; that was in the past, before I knew Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; The sensitively impervious, the securely firm, the female Irish hand just as we know it. In this article, I‘ll be analyzing six of her poems; each pair belongs to a different poetry collection.

Abstract could be the de facto manifesto of any poetry collection Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin puts together, a typical poet with rejection of closure. She plays us with her expressive language, she magnetizes us in her lines as late as her kingdom of thought with its settings of action, subsequently she abandons us, just as we create a soft spot for those words and rhymes and ideas, she leaves off; with our eyes wide open. Another Ní Chuilleanáin tactic is to draw from a legendary tale or a known story and start in the middle, with pronouns referring to characters that haven’t been introduced to us. Superb phenomena of a poet she is.

As one might think, this kind of a strong poet might be a rebel against the church, traditions or attitudes in Ireland; she surprisingly has a set of red limits and gives the benefit of the doubt even when she tackles a misfortune. She does not glorify faith or the church per say, but neither does she criticize unmercifully. Our poet is an imagist; her poetry is rich with images and metaphors of nuns in untraditional scenes.


While her vocabulary ranges from pure traditional Irish terminology of special historical incidents to common and simplified expressions; her language remains designedly obscure yet expressive, leaving the reader with thirst for more.


I will be analyzing – as much as one could possibly analyze in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry without going away from the straight and narrow- two poems of the last three poetry collections she has

published, to try and achieve a general understanding of her format, tactics, and the personal nimbleness she submits to the reader.



“The Boys of Bluehill” is the latest collection of poetry by Ní Chuilleanáin, published last year. This was definitely a different set of poems composed by an accumulation of equanimity.
Her mysterious themes are clearer by time; A Ní Chuilleanáin reader can moderately expose what occurs in her mind by reaching this book, a Ní Chuilleanáin reader, knows that she will deprive her/him from the joy of a full story supplied with the final relief of knowing that this poem has reached it’s destination, the characters are fulfilled, and there are no more words that can fit in for the reader to grasp finer. Rather, this reader is premeditatedly left godforsaken into iniquity.

Judgment day
For once, here’s a subject where no corner is left For a cat or a lion, there’s no shelf
For a parked cardinal’s hat, no neat
Stack of wood for winter, no tools
Tidy on their hooks.
Nobody calmly
Pouring wine or hoisting a weighty barrel,
Not even a window or a door to admit
Light from a garden or a bare yard –
Only rising bodies and falling, and odd blown scraps, Or bolts unrolling, of colored cloth,
Wide falls or skimped ends.
Is this where they were bound, they robed Processions of my childhood that wound past Open doors with hallstands, area gates. Narrow entries, wisely departing cats?
Away from every angle, every weight
Sinking into our lives like the mark
Of a body in a bed? To this great quarrel where Nothing is real, only the teeth and the bite

And the cascading remnants
That curtain away all that has passed?


This poem is a field of action, a decisive poem that has caught my attention of the last collection. As always, from the beginning of the poem you are grasped in the trap Ní Chuilleanáin has built up for you, you enter a wholly different atmosphere, you’re haunted by her idea of the judgment day and her animal metaphors referring to a reality of traumas and soreness. An important note here would be that Ní Chuilleanáin, even when describing the most horrific scenes, never lets you enter a depressed stage of fear and horror. She remains romantic in her language, she remains realist in her points of stress, and she remains optimistically dark when tackling the darkest spaces. She never glorifies the dark, rather powerfully describes it bluntly. No drama, just the art language allows her.

The first stanza brings up the details of the last day on earth as Ní Chuilleanáin sees it, clear language and metaphors of

animals and the dead souls rising above. There is no future, there is no ‘stacked up wood’ for winter and it all comes down to those last moments. Ní Chuilleanáin succeeds in allowing the reader into her world of finale, embracing the intensity and tautness. The yards are bare; there is no way out, no doors, no windows. Hefty vigorous imagery is presented by the end of the stanza with the ‘unrolling’ of the bolts.

The second stanza, as explained earlier, does not bring up any redemption. We are left in that world of finale the poet had carefully knit for us to find the way out ourselves.

This space for the imaginative powers of the reader, this interactive style of mingling the reader with her in the poetical scheme; is part of what makes our poet discerning and stand out from other Irish poets we’re familiar with, Eavan Boland for example, who uses all that poetry offers to get the story crystal clear and the point pure and edgy to the reader.

The second archaic stanza is opened up personified with agitation. Who were they that stole the ‘processions’ of the speaker’s childhood? A sense of surprise is maintained throughout the poem, this creature is feeling alone and robbed, why were the cats escaping, ‘wisely’? Because this must be the end.

In this battle only the teeth and the bite survive and make a difference, while shambles and remains stay alive as a witness of ‘all that has passed’.

This poem gave voice to all the children of war around the world. As this is a recent collection of poetry; this is also a contemporary case on which most writers and poets are expressing stances. Children’s dreams and possessions are being taken away from them everyday, although remains do not curtain away all that has passed, remains remind the world of this injustice and horrible wars that are being waged against children worldwide.

“Youth” is another poem from this collection that tackles the confusion of time; I find it more of a deep and honest monologue that draws from a personal experience:



Youth
I might go back to the place
Where I was young. This wide terminal city --And I’ve lived so much longer here-
Fills up with corners; I turn,
All I have done combines to excavate
A channeled maze where I am escaping home.
When I had to walk past their house
On the way to the hospital I looked Straight ahead, I spent the day Avoiding the windows, while
Wheels unwound the corridors.
Going home past the philanthropic flats
I saw where the baked red frieze unwinds

The date in flourished numbers,
A cloak of soot sealing it –
It does not want to be looked at:
The floating curls melt away; the flowing hands Curve, do not grasp, not quite;
The paid line
Almost lost quivers, there still,
As a child going off down a hill
Turns at the curve of a crescent,
Dissolving in light, in the view
From where her aunt sits marking her piebald
Galleys on her porch: turns again, and shouts goodbye.



The poem mingles time, place and escape to form the theme of death; as laid out in the first stanza. Cities and countries, locations and addresses, are meaningless, there merely stops that we stumble upon in our lives. The speaker conveys her lengthy age away from home. She might go back home. Home usually signifies salvation and refuge, native land and memories, but for her, it was a mere ‘wide and terminal’ city. The house of her youth isn’t hers; she calls it ‘their’ house. As she is in the hospital she refers to the room she’s entering as her home. It might be hers, and she might be visiting who means ‘home’ for her. The rest of the rooms are ‘philanthropists’. A very strong and independent character is conveyed through the lines of Ní Chuilleanáin, not taking a favor from anyone, proud and powerful. Looking ‘straight ahead’, with no fear whatsoever.

Death is presented by the end of the last stanza in reckoning details and memorable metaphors; the speaker is actively numb, witnessing this death. The digital lines of the heart rate is covered with ‘soot’, melting its curls by and by, until it lays there ‘still’, as the dead ‘dissolves’ in light, and the soul shouts; “Goodbye”.




“Sunfish” is a poetry collection published in 2009. The winner of the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize is what brought the lights back to this poet as it received many great reviews and had a special impact on the Irish and English reader.

“The door”, among other poem like ‘you never saw a bed- end in a protestant fence” or ”the polio epidemic” was one of my favorite poems in “Sunfish”. Here it goes:



The Door
When the door opened the lively conversation Beyond it paused very briefly and then pushed on; They were sounds of departure, a railway station, Everyone talking with such hurried animation The voices could hardly be told apart until one
Rang in a sudden silence: ‘the word when, that’s where you start’ –
Then they all shouted goodbye, the trains began to tug and slide;
Joyfully they called while the railways pulled them apart And the door discreetly closed and turned from a celestial arch
Into merely a door, leaving us cold in the outside.

This vorticist poem presenting mass voices and images brings up more than anything; Departure, with all its connotation and denotation is presented in those two short stanzas. Feelings and voices jump out of the text and reach out to you. We have all been there, this rapid alteration form the joyful and lively conversations into the outside, the cold and lonely outside. Human nature of dealing with goodbyes, our body languages and animations conspire to curtain our feelings of breaking apart. Until somebody announces that it’s time, we maintain our calls ‘joyfully’, with our hearts sometimes still outside, in the cold wind, the door closes. And as happy and joyful a door can be for us, it could close up in our faces, and hide away our dreams as we rush after. At the end, this is just a door, Ní Chuilleanáin implies, giving us exactly that portion of hope we needed to close up those wounds and make us feel better about tomorrow. What you leave today might get back to you tomorrow. A door, no matter what it has behind, is just a door, if we have the right keys, we can always find the way inside.

Come Back
Although there is no paper yet, no ink
There is already the hand
That moves, needing to write
Words never shouted from balconies of rock Into the concave hills
To one far away.
If the railway does not exist yet, there is, even Now, a nostril to recognize
The smells of fatigue and arrival,
An ear cocked for the slow beginning, Deliberated, of movement, wheels rolling.
If the telephone has not been invented
By anyone, still the woman in the scratchy shirt, Strapped to her bed, on a dark evening,
With rain beginning outside, is sending Impulses that sound and stop and ask
Again and again for help, from the one

Who is far away, slowly
Beginning her day’s work,
Or, perhaps, from one already in his grave.



Passion; in the title, in between the lines of the first stanza, in the vocabulary, in the language and standpoint; passion and missing, a retrospect of a past person; is what this poem is about.

Although the speaker believes in the power of words, yet still acknowledges the fact that words do not fly, feelings do. Before messages and letters, people still had feelings that passionately flew to their far beloveds. But we can always write when we need help, they can always read and answer. The speaker brings up the ache of a question that echoes in our minds even after finishing the poem, what if we needed the help of a dead beloved, and the hug of our cherished deceased precious? What do we do?
We do; Write. Because words are not mere words, they’re an accumulation of beliefs and sentiments and valid sincerities.

This poem is a great glorification of words, of literature, of poetry, by a great writer, poet, and human.

“Selection of poems” by Ní Chuilleanáin was one of her first most popular collections of poetry published by Wake Forest University Press in 2009.



Again, to the theme of death with the brilliant piece of art:


At My Aunt Blánaid’s Cremation:
In the last dark sidechapel
The faces in the dome
Are bending down like nurses Who lift, and fix, and straighten The bed that’s always waiting, The last place you’ll lie down.
But your face looks away now, And we on your behalf
Recall how lights and voices And bottles and wake glasses Were lined up like the cousins In a bleached photograph.

We carry this back to the city
Since the past is all we know –
We remember the snake called Patrick, Warm in his Aran sleeves –
The past keeps warm, although
It knits up all our griefs:
A cold start in our lives.


Death is inevitable, expected, and boring at times; not in Ní
Chuilleanáin’s poetry. She always finds a way to be creative about death between real incidents and imaginative language, between metaphors and actuality.

The poem opens up drawing the scene for us, with the chapel and the deathbed, and people in the rotunda facing aunt Blánaid, while she faces somewhere else now.

She compares where the aunt is now, to people in consolation commemorating her with drinks and photos. As death takes away someone we care about and cherish, it announces a new start for each and every one of us, the speaker explains.

Highlighting the idea of ‘as someone dies something begins’. Although cold and harsh, it is still a beginning; as always, with her full-half-of-the-glass kind of approach, Ní Chuilleanáin finds the lightest approach and the closest to heart, the optimist emulation in taking a leaf of someone else’s book buoyantly.

Wash
Wash man out of the earth; sheer off
The human shell.
Twenty feet down there’s close cold earth 
So clean.
Wash the man out of the woman:
The strange sweat from her skin, the ashes from her hair. 
Stretch her to dry in the sun
The blue marks on her breast will fade.

Woman and world not yet
Clean as the cat
Leaping to the windowsill with a fish in her teeth; 
Her flat curious eyes reflect the squalid room,
 She begins to wash the water from the fish.


As you begin reading this poem, you start thinking it is a rage against humanity, but as the second stanza comes in, you know it is a new feminist view, the long awaited female Irish poet stance on woman’s relation to man. Is it that hard for a woman to ‘wash’ a man out of her body and system?
Sexual connotation of suffering continue in the filthy room the woman is in; metaphors range from cat to fish and the question if her and the world can be united, if the world actually is at her side. A cold pragmatic take on who a woman is, and her attitudes towards the world and men. The fish is what the woman is trying to clean; she and the world have to be as ‘clean as a cat’. Fragile is this woman; seeking termination, and cleanliness of all that she feels squalid in this life, most of all; men.

A collective analysis of the latest three collections of poetry by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is never enough, I have only discussed two poems of each collection she has published lately, but this dame deserves much more than just an analysis. May this well keep running like lightening, and may this hand persist on sparking off legendary words of wisdom, always.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin