ONE OF Ireland's finest poets, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanain, has been awarded the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize for her most recent collection, The Sun-Fish. At a ceremony in Canada earlier this week, Ní Chuilleanain (68) received the international prize worth $65,000 (€49,000 ).
Established in 2000 in recognition of major poetry written in English as well as works published in translation, three judges, all poets, considered more than 400 collections.
As subversive as it is subtle, as cerebral as it is instinctive, Ní Chuilleanain's voice is urgent, persuasive yet consummately sophisticated, possessed of the elusiveness of a painting. Her poetic diction shifts effortlessly between the formal and more traditional speech. The Sun-Fish, her fourth collection, was shortlisted earlier this year for the TS Eliot award – and should have won. Her genius lies in an ability to identify the magic in the ordinary. She evokes light and the natural world – "While the hare shoots off to the left, her bright eye/Full not only of speed and fear/But surely in the moment a glad power…" ( On Lacking the Killer Instinct, from The Sun-Fish, Gallery Press) – while many of her poems convey the cool interior of stone churches and shadowy rooms.
Born in Cork in 1942, she is associate professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. There are two defining elements in her elegant, meditative work: the Irish language and her interest in Renaissance literature. Her awareness of ritual and ceremony conveys physicality; the detail is painterly: "What is the right name of that small red flower?/It's everywhere, spilling down over the stones/In the sun, every year at just this time." ( Calendar Custom, from The Sun-Fish).
She also has an instinctive feel for the mystery of narrative. In The Cureone woman's story is merely hinted at while another speculates as to the reasons behind the most recent illness of the lady of the house. "They've kept the servant sitting up;/It's late again….. And from her room/She hears them settling the great questions:/How treat a case/Of green-sickness or, again, one of unrequited love?/The fire burns down."
Memory plays a stronger role in this collection, as in The Polio Epidemicwhere the speaker recalls a time of retreat from the normal: "The city lay empty, infected./There was no more ice-cream. The baths were closed all summer." Like a knight on a mission is granted freedom. "One day my father allowed me beyond the gate/With a message to pass through a slit in a blank wall." The speaker "sliced through miles of air,/Free as a plague angel descending".
Vivid word pictures dominate; Ní Chuilleanain is a European poet shaped by Ireland. Her poems transcend politics. Brother Felix Fabri, in which a young monk defies all hazards when reaching a church – "the squared interior is tiled/With names, crowded with banners" – to deliver the names of those wanting prayers, is possibly the finest poem in a collection of wonders.
As part of Gallery Press’s 40th anniversary celebration in the Abbey Theatre at 7.30pm tomorrow, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanain will take part in a reading with several other Gallery poets.