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INTERVIEW WITH EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN KEVIN RAY EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN was born in Cork, in 1946, the daughter of Irish scholar Cormac O Cuilleanáin and novelist Eilis Dillon. She was educated at the University of Cork and at Oxford, and has lectured in medieval and Renaissance literature at Trinity College, Dublin, since 1966. She is married to the poet MacDara Woods and has a son, Niall. Together with Woods and Pearse Hutchinson, she founded the literary magazine Cyphers, which she continues to edit. Critics commonly speak of the “elusiveness” of her poetry, its puzzle and mystery. Ní Chuilleanáin herself refers over and again to the importance of secrecy in her poems, both thematically and in the method of their composition. She writes with an intricate layering, building, in the Renaissance fashion she admires, toward what she has described as “copiousness.” Her recent collection, The Brazen Serpent (Wake Forest University Press, 1995), offers some of her strongest and most personal work to date. It is a book written out of intimate tragedies, the deaths of her sister and her mother. She speaks about the link between these events and their expression in her poetry. KEVIN RAY: While The Brazen Serpent is your fifth collection of poems, excluding the book on Cork, it is your third to appear here in America, with the first two books published here condensing two volumes each. Have you found it at all necessary to craft yourself, to present yourself differently for an American audience or an audience not so immediately familiar with your points of reference, with life and poetry in Ireland? EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN: Well, The Second Voyage was not condensed by me. It was largely Dillon’s collection [Dillon Johnston, director of Wake INTERVIEW WITH EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN 62 Forest University Press]. Then we went over it—I mean the second collection —and put in things I thought shouldn’t have been left out. The Magdalene Sermon was very different, because it contains the whole of the book of The Magdalene Sermon, and then it does condense The Rose Geranium , but in a way in which I felt very strongly that it needed to be condensed . And then I suppose I have never known much about what the American audience wants or wanted. Now, I do remember that a poem we didn’t agree about in The Second Voyage was “Death and Engines.” I think there is something different about the way Americans feel about airplanes, you know. And I couldn’t think it was a bad poem. And I still don’t. kr: Coming to The Brazen Serpent after reading the earlier books, The Brazen Serpent feels different to me. Does it seem so to you? ec: Well, it was unified by time. It was written in a somewhat shorter period than The Magdalene Sermon. And the earliest poems in it were written just at the moment when my sister became fatally ill. And the last ones were written just after my mother’s death. So it was unified by disasters and by—I felt quite strongly—the way people speak about disasters, about things which are in some ways unspeakable, which are resistant to speech. And also I got the thing about the family—about which I now feel rather differently than when I wrote those poems—about the way that families handle events like that, what they say and what they do. It all happened. It all came to me, the events; the reality was there. kr: In “Death and Engines,” which you’ve mentioned, the approach to death, the understanding of death, seems to me very much that of a young woman, the understanding one has at a particular age. Death is a changed presence in your recent poems. It is imagined differently, understood differently. How do you find that your work overall is changing? ec: I certainly feel I’ve changed as a person. In fact, the year 1970 was the year of the suicide of a close friend and of my father’s death. And then nothing really dreadful happened for nearly twenty years; and what I feel...

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