As a poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin casts herself in the role of witness. Her work is characterised by an attentiveness so reverent that it verges on the worshipful; the unwavering intensity of her gaze provides the unifying note in Selected that draws from collections published over nearly three decades.
Ní Chuilleanáin's talent lies in her descriptions. Images flex and crack with revelatory energy; crucially, however, they retain their translucence, electrifying without drawing attention to themselves. Her image of the earth depending from a cherry tree, its leaves "not enough to shield the planet / Hanging there like a fruit" exemplifies her ability to view the everyday in a way that is at once ineffably her own and entirely, instantly recognisable. This is essential poetry.
— Sarah Crown, The Guardian
Among the most distinguished Irish poes of her generation, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s clean, uncluttered lines sing out from the page. Their simplicity is altogether deceptive, however; her propositions are enigmatic, and from her earliest poems we are invited into a fairytale world of ransoms and mysterious tasks:
Ants have helped me
To sort the millet and barley grains.
I have washed bloodstains from the enchanted shirt.
— Elaine Feinstein, The Times
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Selected Poems (Gallery/Faber £12.99) show that she has been equally right in her refinement of a particular vision — and I do mean vision. Whether in the early poem The Second Voyage, where Ulysses despairs of the ocean, or the more recent Her Other Ireland, where a convent and a merry-go-round endure high winds, the reader is transported to somewhere only next door yet hard to return from, eerily matter of fact, charged with suggestion but untainted by illusion, often beautiful and never so dull as to explain itself.
In Ní Chuilleanáin's work the imagination is not a refuge, but the true site of authority, where something is always beginning, where the The Horses of Meaning get out of the stable: “Let them out, and follow the sound, a regular clattering/On the cobbles of the yard, a pouring round the corner/Into the big field, a booming canter.”
— Sean O'Brien, The Sunday Times