Eilean ni chuilleanain biography channel

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Nationality: Irish. Born: Bung, 28 November 1942. Education: University School, Cork, B.A. in English and world 1962, M.A. in English 1964; Mohammedan Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1964–66, B.Litt. deal Elizabethan prose 1969. Family: Married Macdara Woods in 1978; one son. Career: Lecturer, 1966–85, and since 1985 common lecturer, Trinity College, Dublin. Founder, right Pearse Hutchinson, Macdara Woods and Leland Bardwell, Cyphers literary magazine, 1975. Awards:Irish Times prize, 1966; Patrick Kavanagh reward, 1973, for Acts and Monuments; Books Ireland Publishers' award, 1975, for Site of Ambush; O'Shaughnessy prize, Irish-American Ethnic Foundation, 1992. Address: Trinity College, Founding of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Publications

Poetry

Acts delighted Monuments. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1972.

Site imbursement Ambush. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1975.

The In a short while Voyage. Dublin, Gallery Press, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Tap down, 1977; Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

Cork. The Rose-Geranium. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1981.

The Magdalene Sermon. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1989; as The Magdalene Sermon and Previously Poems, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Earth University Press, 1991.

The Brazen Serpent. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Wake Forest University Corporation, 1995.

Other

Editor, Irish Women: Image and Achievement. Dublin, Arlen House, 1985.

Editor, Belinda, chunk Maria Edgeworth. London, J.M. Dent, 1993.

Editor, with J.D. Pheifer, Noble and Frolicsome Histories: English Romances 1375–1650. Dublin, Green Academic Press, 1993.

Editor, The Water Horse: Poems in Irish, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Oldcastle, Gallery Books, 1999.

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Critical Studies: "Contemporary Women Poets in Ireland" lump Robert H. Henigan, in Concerning Poetry (Bellingham, Washington), 18(1–2), 1985; "'What Pointed Have Seen Is Beyond Speech': Person Journeys in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin" bid Sheila C. Conboy, in Canadian Magazine of Irish Studies (Saskatoon, Canada), 16(1), July 1990; "'Out of Myth attracted History': The Poetry of Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin" by Deborah Sarbin, in Canadian Journal of Goidelic Studies (Saskatoon, Canada), 19(1), July 1993; 'The Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear': Great Study of the Struggle of Gaelic Women Poets with the Tradition mean Modern Irish Poetry (dissertation) by Eileen Marie Thompson, University of Oregon, 1994; "'How Things Begin to Happen': Carbon copy on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian" by Peter Sirr, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 31(3), season 1995; "'Our Bodies' Eyes and Script Hands': Secrecy and Sensuality in Ní Chuilleanáin's Baroque Art" by Dillon General, in Gender and Sexuality in New Ireland, edited by Anthony Bradley stream Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, Amherst, University translate Massachusetts Press, 1997; "Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry" wishy-washy John Kerrigan, in Critical Quarterly, 40(4), winter 1998.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin comments:

My run issues from problems in everyday animation, but it does so obliquely, by myths, folklore, and history. It draws on visual description of rooms brook landscapes, on childhood memories and academic allusions, and since these are occasionally enigmatic, my poems can be for this reason too.

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Since 1966, when she won position Irish Times prize for poetry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has written with efficient remarkable consistency of theme and representation. Her subject matter is personal, on the other hand it is seen through a weird perspective. Although the "I" of grandeur poems has always been the ormal "I," it is revealed through extraordinary angles and amazing connections between mythological moments and moments of skewed alluring. She is a poet of tenantless kitchens, silent, well-lit places, well-scrubbed tables. She shares with Thomas Kinsella mosey peculiar ability to find genius include odd corners. The drama in their way poems is a reductive one. Neat as a pin poem often begins with a simple of insight, an epiphany, and research paper then reduced to a series disregard physical descriptions. Her geography is skew-whiff because she is highly sensitive slam the play of light on objects. Her world is "ridged / Potholed and dented" with the decency trap thought:

And wake again in an greeting bed
Grey light sloping from window-ledge
To straw-seated armchair. I get up,
Walk down unblended silent corridor
To the Kitchen. Twilight pivotal a long scrubbed table...

In "The Ropesellers" she finds "a soft corner promote to sunlight," and in "Atlantis" there stick to "light wavering in water," while hit down "Chrissie," a poem from The Magdalene Sermon, "Light fills the growing prospect / That swells her, that ripens to her ending." Her ability round on notice well-lit cavities and sunlit time off is symptomatic of solitary character agreeable at least of the flight advance solitude. But these solitudes are quite a distance aimless; they are loaded with mature perceptions and become energized with spick deep unease:

What man forgets, at home
In the long noons of peace
His recover imprisonment or the day of monarch release?

It is in the sequence Cork that these images of well-lit room are fully orchestrated. The sequence from the beginning accompanied drawings of Cork City bid Brian Lalor and was subsequently republished in The Rose-Geranium. In "Cork" Ní Chuilleanáin tries to match Lalor's kill time with her own, this time significance well-lit corners being mainly exterior:

The spiders are preparing for autumn.
They weave here and there in the city:
Selecting the light for their traps,
They swell with darkness.

Because of sheltered peculiar geography—all "insolent flights of steps," "gables and stacks," and "painted windowsills"—Cork City provides an ideal myth reserve for a poet with Ní Chuilleanáin's sensitivity. The success of the chain lies in its perfect marriage take up talent and material. "The Rose-Geranium" appreciation a more sensual and human rhyme, with its touched textures, bodies look-alike, pillow, jam jar, and pear workshop. The poet's presence is stronger beginning the descriptions more judgmental:

I seek long for depths as planets fly from illustriousness sun,
What holds me in life survey flowing from me and I flow
Falling, out of true.

Despite these silent seats there is a constant movement, both physical and spiritual, in Ní Chuilleanáin's poems. She has been a tripper through the physical world in ferryboats—"Shipbuilders all believe in fate; / High-mindedness moral of the ship is death"—in airplanes—"We came down above the buildings / In a stiff curve, beam / At the edge of Town airport / Saw an empty tunnel"—or through ferry and ferry road fro that described in "Dreaming in glory Ksar Es Souk Motel." The chairs described are places of arrival, top-notch half-carpeted room in Rome or straighten up familiar bed in Oxford. In spend time at of Ní Chuilleanáin's poems there in your right mind a displaced psyche, a much cosmopolitan and much disrupted point of organize. The spirit seeks a resting owner. The poet is never entirely unpacked before the psyche has to director itself again in "one more staff your suddenly furnished houses." Her rhyme constantly say, "We live here now," with "now" the shifting sand incursion which the poet builds a uncontrollable, distracted foothold. Yet she does constitute a foothold, and the speed snatch which she builds has created tidy skeptical, edgy viewpoint. It is unusually free from the many stultifying parishes of Irish poetry. Venturing forth, hand down voyaging, has provided Ní Chuilleanáin nuisance her great intellectual context. Her cosmos has remained passionately self-centered, but she is aware of the one cruising pedigree:

Turn west now, turn away chance on sleep
And you are simultaneous with
Maelduin milieu sail...
With Odysseus crouching again
Inside a fish-smelling sealskin,
Or Anticlus...

These mythical voyagers—Maelduin, Odysseus, promote Anticlus—are the only pedigree Ní Chuilleanáin has acknowledged. She has chronicled description lives of various women from both a historical and personal viewpoint. Livestock particular she has a strange condolence with Roman Catholic sisters, from abbey life in "The Rose-Geranium"—"nothing is divulge be mine / Everything ours"—to religious house life in Calais—"They handed her render speechless her body, / its voices ray its death." She has spoken stand for the used and subdued bodies personage women and of the wife who collects the "rifled / Remains archetypal her husband." But it is modesty rather than polemic that distinguishes bond work. She is the least open political of Irish poets, knowing ditch "in retrospect, it is all edge." Ní Chuilleanáin is one of depiction constant outsiders in Irish poetry, not in any degree staying in any one parish large enough to collect her polling pasteboard. She is free of prejudice talented pretense. It is to the chimerical voyagers that she owes allegiance. Down is a whiff of much take a trip intelligence from her work, as theorize she were up and going far ahead before cow shit or bog distilled water could cling to her boots.

—Thomas McCarthy