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CHAPTER 8 Conclusion Thin as a wash, does it get any deeper At all, or could we see its depth, since we catch Only the gleam when the flipped blade Rewards the light, like a silk flash of hair in the water. ‘The Water’ (S 38) Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ability to tease many associations and meanings from images and what she calls ‘slippery’ words is a key to her work, as well as to how she views human experience. Hers is a world of questions, ambiguities and complexities, where we get glances and limited revelations, but also confront secrets and obstacles to understanding . Words are open to different meanings and different translations. There is always the ‘other side’, whether that is a shore across water, a spiritual world behind the material world, a scene seen from another angle, or a different point of view. Open to the possibility that meaning is rarely fixed, Ní Chuilleanáin, as was noted in Chapter 1, is like the speaker in ‘Early Recollections’ (SP 24) who tells us: ‘I know how things begin to happen / But never expect an end’. Nevertheless, Ní Chuilleanáin has said ‘what attracts me is that which I do not know’, and her poetry is a quest to continue to search. The poem ’The Water’ from The Sun-fish (S 38) illustrates some of the major images and themes that Ní Chuilleanáin has developed throughout her career. Water, a central symbol from her earliest volumes, is used again to suggest the limits of our vision and understanding, but also to evoke the glimpses we get of an immaterial world. This sonnet, like many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, is an extended question which asks whether water gets any deeper or ‘could we see its depth?’ when we can only catch ‘the gleam when the flipped blade / Rewards the light’. The difficulty of certainty is reinforced in this poem by the images of 150 light and shadow which both reveal and hide. Nevertheless, the poem maintains that, despite the mystery that water represents, ‘floating shards of light are really there’ and the material world gives us hints and guesses of what lies beneath the surface. This is the major theme in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, and the image in the final line of a ‘lighthouse searching the dark, scraping the sea with its beam’ also highlights, as it has in other poems, the related theme of the destructive power of water, dark oceans and floods symbols for disaster and violence. In an early poem from Acts and Monuments, ‘Wash’ (SP 15), for example, the ordinary task of washing water from a fish is juxtaposed with a ‘deeper’ but undefined image of violence: ‘Wash the man out of the woman: / The strange sweat from her skin, the ashes from her hair. / Stretch her to dry in the sun / The blue marks on her breast will fade’. More than any other element of her poetry, it is Ní Chuilleanáin’s images that reinforce her belief that the material world gives us only hints of what lies behind, what is below the surface, what is on the other side. Water is part of a pattern of images of nature, including sunlight, shadow, ocean, land, mists, clouds, mountains and floods, which reinforces the idea of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’, which Ní Chuilleanáin has used to describe her view of history, but applies to other aspects of her work as well. The architectural details of walls, doors, windows, houses and churches, which appear over and over again in her poetry, represent both openings and barriers, and bridges suggest a movement from one realm to another. The spaces of convents, cloisters and cathedrals illustrate enclosures which both satisfy and mystify, material spaces which embody spiritual rituals, values and meaning. The recurring images of angles reinforce her belief that seeing something from a different viewpoint can provide new insight. Such images demonstrate a vision that influences every aspect of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work. She has created a unique collection of unusual and often unexpected female figures who illustrate many aspects of human character and behaviour. In dealing with iconic females, Ní Chuilleanáin does not necessarily reject all the attributes embodied in a conventional image, but rather shows us the figure from a new angle. St Mary Magdalene, for example, is imagined preaching at the end of her life, and nuns, often perceived as...

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