In praise of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, by John McAuliffe

In 1966 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin won The Irish Times Poetry Prize for a poem called The Second Voyage, in which she describes looking into the “simmering sea”:

If there was a single

Streak of decency in these waves now, they’d be ridged

Pocked and dented with the battering they’ve had,

And we could name them as Adam named the beasts,

Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one

With admiration; they’d notice us passing

And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these

Have less character than sheep and need more patience.

It is an amazingly confident poem, moreso when we realise that the speaker is Odysseus and that Ní Chuilleanáin understands that “to write like Homer is not to write like Homer”. For nearly 50 years, she has written such unprogrammatic, rhythmically inventive and, crucially, original poems. Much anthologised, her last book The Sun-Fish (2009) won the International Griffin Prize for Best Book and showed that an international readership is catching up with her. Her forthcoming collection, The Boys of Bluehill, will be many people’s choice of 2015’s most eagerly awaited poetry collection.

Other favourites: Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien.

John McAuliffe is the chief poetry reviewer for The Irish Times. He co-directs the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and has had three collections published.