Selected Poems

The patient, unhurried assembly of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ?rst collection resulted in an uncommonly accomplished debut. Poems from Acts and Monuments (1972) have already revealed their lasting power. In this timely retrospective they join generous selections from each of her subsequent books down to The Girl who Married the Reindeer (2001). In the words of Ruth Padel (Financial Times) ‘Her eerie blend of the legendary and modern sounds utterly natural. A new book from her is a major event.’ ‘There is something second sighted, as it were, about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, by which I don’t mean that she has any prophetic af?atus, more that her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greetings.’ — Seamus Heaney