Saints and Sisters: The Sacred Chorus in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

While Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (b. 1942) is increasingly regarded as a major figure among Irish writers, her poetry often presents a critical enigma, perplexing her readers and critics as much as it impresses them. Much of the perplexity of what John Kerrigan calls Ní Chuilleanáin’s “art of secrecy” derives from the poet’s attention in her writing to a border, a crossing, or—to use an image that she herself acknowledges—a “threshold.”¹ Her attention is repeatedly drawn to liminal places—those spaces that are both and between, simultaneously no place and several places. Ní Chuilleanáin’s writing thus subverts the limited, and limiting, conception of a world divided into competing and defined categories: romance versus history, sacred against secular, male contrasted with female. Helen Emmitt observes that “Borderlines, in which competing ideas and images co-exist, cannot be ‘domesticated’ or ‘consumed’” in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry.²

The ability of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work to resist interpretive simplicities imparts much of the authenticity and authority to her work. This authenticity has been especially celebrated for its contribution as a voice among Irish women poets. Deborah Sarbin, for example, calls on Eavan Boland’s oft-quoted phrase of how the woman longs to move “out of myth into history” to argue that the primary project shared by Boland and Ní Chuilleanáin is “to demythologize and re-historicize” in order to “restore women into historical vision and to reintroduce the previously silenced voices of women.”³ But if Ní Chuilleanáin’s work challenges the expectations of the old narrative, it also just as readily resists the confines of the new one, in which the female voice and vision replaces, or at least joins, the dominant male one. Ní Chuilleanáin’s work instead often registers as much as mystical utterance as the voice of lyrical declaration; in this, she is at least as much an heir to a Gaelic, bardic tradition as she is to the post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic “I” of the modern lyricist.⁴ The elusiveness of her poetry, and the capacity of her poems to suggest that she is stepping into the bardic tradition, bring back surprising intimations of the “old Ireland” and its pantheon of such feminized figures as the cailleach and Mother Ireland.

Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry asks us to reconcile these nearly competing visions; her work is said to move us out of myth, even as it calls those myths to mind. Ní Chuilleanáin herself has said that what she has written “always seems to be gathered back again into mythology.”⁵ Such contradictions should not be surprising if we take seriously the acclaim Ní Chuilleanáin has received for her ability to hold in her “threshold” images of two contradictory worlds, her ability to write beyond or at borders and outside of frameworks. Kevin Ray turns to metaphors to try to describe this multiplicity of meaning: “Ní Chuilleanáin’s thresholds do not assert the presence of meaning . . . ; rather, they double meaning, fold it upon itself, forming pockets, grottoes, unseen places from what was flatly open.”⁶ A more particular source than these generalized, metaphorical thresholds and grottoes of meaning to which we might turn to consider Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, however, is not the “unseen places” but the seen—and seeing—figures of sacred, visionary women to which many of her works make reference. These figures include women resembling the ancient crones and hags of Irish mythology, but they also include sacred figures of the Christian tradition, women saints or nuns in a convent. These women, Ní Chuilleanáin’s sacred chorus, not only provide a new vision, a revised mythology, but they do so through a collective voice that challenges the authority of the traditional lyric speaker.

Ní Chuilleanáin acknowledges that her memory of nuns provided an important source in her development of an authentic poetic vision in her work. “I saw in memory,” she writes, “a nun working, sewing, polishing, writing, looking after an...