The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry

Endnotes

Endnotes CHAPTER 1. Beginnings 1. Where possible, I have given the page numbers from Ní Chuilleanáin’s Selected Poems (SP) published by Gallery Press in 2008. When poems are not included in the Selected Poems, I have given page numbers from the Gallery Press collections in which they were published, using the following abbreviations: AM, Acts and Monuments (1972); C, Cork (1977); RG, Rose Geranium (1981); SV, The Second Voyage (1986); MS, The Magdalene Sermon (1989); BS, The Brazen Serpent (1994); GMR, The Girl who Married the Reindeer (2001); S, The Sun-fish (2009). The poems are also available in the Wake Forest University Press editions of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, in some cases in combined volumes like The Magdalene Sermon and Earlier Poems (1991). 2. Deborah McWilliams Consalvo, ‘An Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish Literary Supplement, vol. 12, no. 1 (1993), p. 16. 3. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Introduction’, Irish Women, Image and Achievement (Dublin: Arlen House, 1985), pp. 3, 8. 4. Ibid., p. 2. 5. Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (eds), Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th & 20th Centuries (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1989), pp. 4–5. 6. Pilar Villar-Argáiz, ‘“The Text of It”: A Conversation with Eavan Boland’, New Hibernia Review, vol. 10, no. 2 (2006), pp. 52–67, at pp. 53–4. Boland has written extensively about the place of women in Irish culture; see especially her poetry collection, Outside History (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), and her essay collection, Object Lessons (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995). 7. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, ‘An Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (1994), pp. 63–74, at p. 65. 8. Seamus Deane et al. (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols I–III (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1992). 9. For information on the development and reception of the Field Day volumes on women’s writing, see Margaret Kelleher, ‘The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women’s Literary Studies’, Irish Review, vol. 30 (2003), pp. 82–94; Gerardine Meaney’s essay, ‘Engendering the Postmodern Canon? The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes IV and V: Women’s Writing and Traditions’, in Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St Peter (eds), Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts and Contexts (Cork University Press, 2007); and Helen Thompson (ed.), The Current Debate about the Irish Literary Canon (Lampeter, 157 UK and Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). In the latter, Rebecca Pelan’s essay ‘Literally Loose Cannon or Loosening the Canon’ discusses the judgment of The Irish Times literary editor Eileen Battersby that the new volumes had a ‘sociological agenda’ and were more ‘sociological than textual and scholarly’, as well as Patricia Coughlan’s response to Battersby. 10. A.A. Kelly’s Wildish Things: An Anthology of Verse by Irish Women (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988) and Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight, edited by Eilís Ní Dhuibhne (Dublin: New Island, 1995) are also significant anthologies of women’s verse. By the late 1960s writing by women began to appear more frequently in poetry journals and from some of the smaller presses like Arlen House, Attic Press and Salmon Publishing, whose missions involved publishing women poets. Ní Chuilleanáin’s Acts and Monuments was issued by Gallery Press in 1972, though she was the only woman on the Gallery list at that time, a typical situation at other presses also. Not until Joan McBreen’s and Peggy O’Brien’s anthologies in 1999 were comprehensive collections of modern women poets available in an anthology of Irish poetry. In her introduction, McBreen points out the need for such a collection, noting that while more women poets were slowly finding their way into print in Ireland, anthologies were often failing to acknowledge their work, citing the Oxford Book of Irish Verse whose 1958 collection featured seventeen women poets, while the later 1986 version had none. A review of other poetry anthologies reveals similar small representation. 11. Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. xviii. 12. Inés Praga, ‘Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, in Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa Gonzáles, Inés Praga and Esther Aliaga (eds), Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 83–93, at p. 83. It must be said that Ireland was not alone in this phenomenon of women poets gradually disappearing from view. Jane Dowson, in ‘“Older Sisters are Very Sobering...