POETRY:IN HER POEM Early Recollections, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin writes: "I discovered the habits of moss/ That secretly freezes the stone,/ Rust softly biting the hinges/ To keep the door always open./ I became aware of truth/ Like the tide helplessly rising and falling in one place", writes Richard Tillinghast.
In another poem she asserts that "Going anywhere fast is a trap". Close attention to life's processes typifies Ní Chuilleanáin's work. She has consistently offered her readers patient, unhurried acts of witness. Her much-anticipated Selected Poems includes poems taken from six books beginning with Acts and Monuments, 1972, through The Girl Who Married The Reindeer, 2001. What emerges is a luminous account of how the world may be apprehended, both in its minutiae and in its spiritual dimensions. Taken as a whole, her new book shows her to be one of the essential presences in contemporary Irish poetry.
Henry James famously counselled a young writer to be "one upon whom nothing is lost". Measured by that standard, Ní Chuilleanáin is not found wanting. She has a gift for rendering interior spaces at the same time luminous and numinous that is reminiscent of certain painters: Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt and William Orpen all come to mind. Her words coax rooms and passageways to speak in their own disembodied voices of the life that occurs or has occurred within them. Here is the ending of Night Journeys from The Rose-Geranium, 1981, one of my favourites among her books:
I get up,
Walk down a silent corridor
To the kitchen. Twilight and a long scrubbed table,
The tap drips in an enamel basin
Containing peeled potatoes. A door half-open and
I can hear somebody snoring.
In the same collection our attention is drawn to "The walls of tunnels in walls/ Made by wires of bells, and the shadows of square spaces/ Left high on kitchen walls/ By the removal of those bells on their boards . . .". This little scene amounts to nothing less than a memorial for an earlier age when people kept servants. Nearby, obliviously, in the same poem but as if in a different world, "The delicate wise slug is caressing/ Ribbed undersides of blue cabbage leaves/ While on top of them rain dances". This is a poet who not only has a good eye; she speaks with a voice that is satisfyingly crisp and economical. The Italian Kitchen ends, "I've bought blankets and firewood; we live here now". "When my skin was as smooth as/ A jamjar of water", another poem says, "I looked for time in my father's eyes".
Ní Chuilleanáin is a Cork woman by origin, and as befits the traditions of that independent city, she has a keen sense of Ireland's cultural and religious ties to the European continent, Italy and France in particular, that is reminiscent of Thomas McCarthy's recent Merchant Prince. In addition, Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry reflects an inner spiritual journey. Reading these poems in aggregate, one is struck by their persistent preoccupation with conventual spirituality, an inwardness for which the cloister is both a locus and an emblem.
It almost goes without saying that this spirituality has the flavour of a distinct if guarded female essence - a certain cleanliness, the sense of being very careful, and a hint of contained joy. A poem placed near the end of the book, The Cloister of Bones, chances an unusual angle, looking down on a town "from the highest point,/ Best of all a belltower", where the poet's eye watches for "the cloistering blank of a street wall,/ A dark reticence of windows . . . arched and bouncing/ Naves; a corseted apse . . . I search for hints of doors inside doors . . . An avid presence demanding flowers and hush". The exquisite ending of this sly poem, which delves into secret spaces, which gains strength from what it withholds, is worth savouring in its entirety:
If I guess right I hope for
A runner of garden, the right length
For taking a prayerbook for a walk,
A small stitching of cemetery ground,
Strict festivals, an hour for the tremble
Of women's laughter, corners for
mile-high panics:
And to find the meaning of the Women's Christmas.
Poets follow their own inner imperatives and please themselves. But surely one reason we value poetry is because of its ability to articulate the life of a people. Ireland traditionally has been a realm of reticence, doors inside doors, of secrets kept, only to be perhaps revealed after time has passed. To quote another memorable poem from this book, it has been a place of "old roads . . . missing from the map . . . abandoned roads". "Slowly the old roads lose their grip", the poem concludes. But no one is better equipped to trace them and show how they lead into the present than Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
Richard Tillinghast is the author of a dozen books of poetry and non-fiction, the latest of which is The New Life: Poems, from Copper Beech, published this year
Selected Poems By Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin The Gallery Press, 119pp. €20