A poet's relationship with words and her relationship with life are inseparable. Eithne Strong, who died, aged 76, at her home in Monkstown, Co Dublin, on August 24th, was a poet in quest of answers and of peace - a journeywoman intrigued by the process of living.
One of five children, she was born in Glensharrold, Co Limerick, in 1923. She was educated locally, followed by a time working as a civil servant and as a teacher, and by a brief period at Trinity College, Dublin.
She married the writer and psychoanalyst Rupert Strong in 1943. As a mother of nine children, she returned to Trinity College to study modern languages in 1969.
She wrote, both in Irish and English, throughout her life. Her poetry included: Songs of Living (1961); Sarah, in Passing (1974); Flesh: The Greatest Sin (1982); Nobel (1988) and Spatial Nosing (1993).
Her first book of Irish verse, An Gor (1942) was followed by Cairt Oibre (1980); Fuil agus Fallai (1983); An Sagart Pinc (1990) and Aoife Fe Ghlas (1990).
In addition to many short stories, she published two novels, Degrees of Kindred (1979) and The Love Riddle (1993).
At literary events she was a striking figure with her cap of strong silver hair; her smile gentle, open, sometimes curious, as she looked into your face.
She was interested in what younger writers were doing - a rare thing in a senior writer. And, because she had been publishing in Irish and English for so long, she was very much a fount of quiet, but humorously-dispensed wisdom.
Living within a vortex of work, children, writing and marriage to Rupert Strong, she challenged convention in her own distinctive and unorthodox way.
She had that quality known as style. Not ostentatious style, not the self-conscious blue-stocking kind either, but another honest kind, innate to her disposition.
She was a quiet bohemian. One did not hear about her doings, her victories, or any spectacular disgraces - the kind of talk that traditionally oils the hubs of idle conversation.
Instead, one was more likely to hear about her beloved son Philip, who so often accompanied her to the readings, or in scraps of an exchange she might divulge hints of the full spectrum of her past. She believed that one of the great sadnesses in existence must be that of the too-timidly explored life, the life which has no room for forgiveness or reconciliation. She once remarked, "You have to do everything if you are genuinely searching."
She read all over the world as well as at home. She was listed to read at next month's Scriobh Literary Festival. She travelled, crusaded, and quested, and it is all laid bare in the writing.
The work of this prolific writer who never toadied to the prevailing zeitgeist, is marked by a concern for minority issues and women's rights.
Some of the poems by chance coincided in expression with the native feminist stirrings during the 1970s, but they were primarily humanist pieces in which the nuances of an non-polemic perspective could register, without becoming propagandist.
Everything she wrote was infused with her own particular fire, and not with what somebody else dictated as being the correct theme, cause, or style.
She has been described variously as a "druidess" and a "priestess". Eithne Strong (nee O'Connell): writer; true bohemian; honest dealer; mentor; wise woman in search of truth and peace, was predeceased by her husband, Rupert. She is survived by her children Jenny, Brita, Sarah, Rachel, Helen, Kevin, Nuala, Lorraine and Philip, and by her brother Noel.
Eithne Strong: born 1923; died August, 1999