Although The Map of the World abounds in the tales half-told or hinted at for which Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is widely admired this book reaches further into the ways one might confront misfortune and disaster and the whole weight of history. Her images present ideas about how to engage with the past and about other genres’ representations of it.
Already celebrated poems such as ‘St Brigid’s Well’ and ‘Muriel Gifford After Her Fever’ mix with lines prompted by Milton and Marvell and the artists Nano Reid and Helen Moloney to ‘hold in view / history’s patched lining, the sewing’. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s corruscating poems are like no one else’s: ‘a stream is venturing a brisk melody’. So satisfying is the experience of this poet’s art a new collection of poems by her is an occasion for rejoicing.
