Special Issue: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin || 'Each Page Lies Open to the Version of Every Other':...

'Each Page Lies Open to the Version of Every Other': History in the Poetry of Eiléan NíChuilleanáinAuthor(s): Nicholas AllenSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, Special Issue: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Spring -Summer, 2007), pp. 22-35Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25517333 .

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Nicholas Allen

'Each Page Lies Open to the Version of Every Other": History in the Poetry of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

'History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now'.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations.1

To make a case for history in Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's poetry, a case must first be made for the contemporary. The collapsed distance between past and present is part of her writing's enduring difficulty. It is also a source of its power, the refusal to separate history from the

now, as Benjamin puts it, is symbolic of a determination to rethread the

past's strands, the effect to leave the tapestry unfinished, the

manuscript in draft. This seems paradoxical given the compositional care of Ni Chuilleanain's poetry, the learned, at times esoteric, range of its allusions, and the complexity of its vocabulary (what Ni Chuilleanain herself calls 'very precise, innovative, difficult work').2 I want to read the figuration of history in her work as a multiplicity that registers frequently as a sensation of mystery. In this subtle

choreography of past and present, Ni Chuilleanain sidesteps the

arrangement of memory into definite forms, or what we more typically think of as history, that harmony of discordant dates that allows for

representable translation between the private and public spheres. As a

Renaissance scholar, trained in the trade of manuscripts, alert to the errata of the changing text, Ni Chuilleanain seems acutely aware of

history's limits. Her poetry acts as an incantation to voices from the

margin; her words are much like a scribe's asides, her commentary oblique, personal, mysterious. My aim here is to chart some co-ordinates of this traumatized

cosmology, charting those points where Ni Chuilleanain's poetry engages with the past in forms alternate to more familiar poetic tropes, of direct witness, say, or rebuke. To do this, I shall concentrate on a small number of poems in her recent collection, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, testing them against two other, better recognized, formations of history by Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney Implicit in these comparisons is the possibility of a gendered difference between alternate ways of processing and representing history, a difference that can be traced, arguably, to the foundations of the Irish state, with its

22



HISTORY IN THE POETRY OF EILEAN NI CHUILLEANAIN

war between treatyites and republicans, regulars and irregulars, statesmen and hysterics. All of which suggests one further dynamic to

Ni Chuilleanain's process of the past, her growing up in Cork, a south that resonates in the warmer climes of continental Europe to which her

poetry turns so often. To represent history, then, in Ni Chuilleanain's work is to construct a typology of mystery or an assembly of allusive connections. An obsession with history, of course, is understood to be a defining Irish characteristic. Either we never forget, or do not want to remember. The vocabulary for this obsession circulates around images of trauma and recovery

? such a process is reminiscent of Hayden White's joke in which he promised to invent a new therapy, called

narratology, as a replacement for psychoanalysis, the aim being that

everyone will get the story they deserve. That tradition in Irish poetry is often ignored

? that goes back at least to the work of Blanaid Salkeld, and continues today in the writing of Medbh McGuckian ? which represents the present as an assembly of obscure, if not unknowable, motivations powered by pasts that will not rest. Irene Gilsenan Nordin interprets such processes in the poetry of Ni Chuilleanain as permitting 'the establishment of female identity' through 'the blurring of boundaries between past and present'.3

Working from this premise, I shall argue that Ni Chuilleanain's poems trace the effect of these pasts in dismantled versions of community and association that suggest another possible world of intimate association.

My problem is that such poetry defies the type of reading I want to

practise. Close attention after all presumes discovery of traces that constitute a version of the poem. Expecting failure at the outset, I shall situate two of Ni Chuilleanain's poems, 'Autun' and 'Crossing the Loire' from The Girl Who Married the Reindeer in the context of two others that might provide a commentary, Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford' and Seamus Heaney's 'North'. All these

poems revolve around questions of discovery and remembrance; what will emerge are three very different strategies by which the reader

might experience the events of conscious loss we otherwise call history. This play between presence and recovery emerges in another of the

poems from The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, 'In Her Other House'. The identification of a female space is significant in poetry that seeks to

express itself in a language that is alien to the received concerns of

myth and nation; a missing male appears as an illusion in a house whose domesticity is secured by an agency not physical, the table

'spread and cleared by invisible hands'.4 There are hints of Larkin and MacNeice in this hallucinatory quotidian, a postman bringing letters to a family bound by thought, not blood. There are further gestures towards Joyce, and the Misses Morkans' dinner party, in the epiphany that follows:

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

It is the dead who serve us, and I see

My father's glass and the bottle of sour stout at hand

Guarding his place (so I know it cannot be real; The only boy with six sisters never learned

To set a table, though books lined up at his command).5

There is a playful rebuke here, but encoded in the memory is an

observation that will recur: 'It is the dead who serve us'.6 Certainly there seems little separation between this world and whatever

precedes or follows in much of the work ? and I think here especially of that beautiful poem of exile, 'Peace in the Mountains', where

... Somewhere two streets away It was Saturday and the immigrant weddings were feasted Behind garden walls with sweet almond milk and loud music.7

'In Her Other House' proceeds with an equal sense of ceremony, as the

imagined family turns and a male figure, who may be a second version of the father, enters. There is a hint of disturbance about his past

?

'Where he has been,/You turn out your pockets every time a door is

opened.'8 But he 'turns like a dancer'9 in shedding his coat, the secret

grace of movement another key to a collection that is based so much in travel and the erring perspective. The poem ends with a scene reminiscent of a Vermeer painting, but in this case the women are

outside, the man inside, attentive, aware of that world which exists

beyond his own domestic space:

Women's voices sound outside, he breathes deeply and

quickly And returns to talk to the fire, smiling and warming his

hands In this house there is no need to wait for the verdict of

history And each page lies open to the version of every other.10

This not quite still life is typical of the poems in The Girl Who Married the Reindeer. Waiting for the verdict of history suggests an engagement

with time that expects judgement from the progressive assembly of material evidence, a process anathema to Ni Chuilleanain's poetry, all of which defies the disassembly of elements that permits close reading in the traditional sense. For all the movement associated with her

work, the car journeys, Ireland, France, Italy, the sights outside the

wrindow, there is serial investment too in the stopped moment. This

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HISTORY EN THE POETRY OF EILEAN NI CHUILLEANAIN

break is connected to her scepticism about the force associated with the

production of meaning. In this, Ni Chuilleanain mirrors one of Walter

Benjamin's reflections on history, that 'Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well'. Her poetry is full of arresting images, mixtures often of the mythical and the medieval. This past obsession opens up moments of stillness that are broken and defy connection. Here, then, is history, cloaked, fugitive, invisible except in the carefully caught reflections of other times. This aura emerges in the

poem following Tn Her Other House', 'In Her Other Ireland', the two works of similar title acting as reflections on each other. Tn Her Other Ireland' describes a small town in a storm, the wind blowing through the streets. The poem begins unsure of its own setting, light reflected from wet flagstones, 'in places thick with glass'. Ni Chuilleanain often

plays with images of transparency, leaving the reader in the presence of absence even as we expect an

image to appear.

The names are lonely, the shutters blank ?

No one's around when the wind blows.11

The poem moves first to a convent, and then to a fairground, the rituals of each disrupted by the weather. In the convent the novices practise the 'service for deliverance from storms and thunder'. In the

fairground the old man at the merry-go-round struggles to keep the wheel in place. He fails, and the image of the merry-go-round lifted by an invisible force is central to a moment of magic disturbance:

... He calls his son

To throw him a rope, and watch for a loosening Strut or a pelmet or the whole wheel

Spinning lifting and drifting and crashing.

But it spins away, grinding up speed, Growling above the thunder.12

The image of the wheel is a fundamental symbol of history as a form of

recurrence, the pitch and fall of human experience charted in a plethora of religious and literary systems. Seeing the merry-go-round spin away is a picture of the limits of such understanding, the entertaining play of distraction found narrow in the confines of this 'small town' with 'Nowhere to go when the wind blows'.13 How to think beyond the received structures of thought and form that set the limits of social contact is a central question that has faced Irish poets since

independence, the question made sharper by the Northern Troubles.

Here, everyday, was a reminder that atrocity was part of modernity's

25




fabric. In Ni Chuilleanain's poetry, may be found a new reply to the old

responses, a revolution hidden, as revolutions so often are, in antique

clothing, the baroque imagery and artic exposure the residue of a poetry that allows for an unfinished mortality. History is a constant present, a text of versions, like a medieval manuscript that continually interplays, a book where each page lies open to its companions. Such themes are further pursued in 'Autun'. Autun is in modern-day Burgundy, a town founded two millennia ago by the Roman emperor Augustus:

As I drove away from the sepulchre of Lazarus, while the French cows looked sadly out under the wet branches of Berry, I could hear other voices drowning the Grande Polonaise on the radio.. ,14

The car journey is a recurrent motif in Seamus Heaney's poetry which finds further echo in the drowning voices, reminiscent of 'North', as we shall read. The space between the inside and outside, figured through the glazed windows of a speeding machine, is an apt site to figure relations between individuals and their environment. In the perfect picture of the moment, we might miss the driver's choice of music, Frederic Chopin's 'Andante Spinato et Grande Polonaise Brillante'.

Chopin's interlude in this poem recalls Flann O'Brien's much earlier

play on the relationship between the composer and the French novelist

Georges Sand, famous for her wearing of male clothes and bisexual

relationships. In one extended flight of fancy O'Brien told the story of

Josephine Cumiskey an alter-ego, he claimed, of Joseph Conrad, who met Georges Sand in Singapore: 'The years had left their mark on

Josephine Cumisky No longer cool, slim and unhurried, it was a

warm-hearted, buxom matron that won the affection of Sand, tired out

by a life tuning Chopin's grand piano.'lD In 'Autun', the dead seem at first to take over the music, but as the poem proceeds we can read

Chopin persisting in the bony drum of their fingers:

Remember us, we have travelled as far

as Lazarus to Autun,

and have not we too been dead and in the grave many times now7, how long

at a stretch

have we had no music but the skeleton tune the bones make humming, the knuckles warning each other to wait for the pause and then the long low note the second and third fingers of the left hand hold down like a headstone.16

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The synchronicity between art and monument suggest a counter

intuitive, negative link between form and representation. Musical notes

carry a weight, their progress the construction of a headstone. The flesh of this skeleton tune suggests a further barbarity, the poem moving to a

personal voice; 'we' is refined to T in mimicry of Chopin's soothing play:

How often was I taken apart, the ribs opened like a liquor press, and for decades I heard nothing from my shoulders ?

my hair flying, at large like a comet ?

how often reconstructed,

wrapped and lagged in my flesh, and again mapped and logged, rolled up and put away

safely, for ever.17

An image of resurrection surfaces in reiteration of the sepulchre of

Lazarus, which was mentioned in the opening lines. There is no definite

gender to the speaker now. The body's continual dissection after death takes the image of art, in music or literature, to a further, uncomfortable

association, the reconstruction of the physical form analogous to the creation of images, in maps and logs. In resistance to this, words become opaque in the poem's final movement:

On the mornings of my risings I can hardly see in the steam. But I know I arise like the infant that dances out of the womb

bursting with script, the copious long lines, the redundant questions of childhood. She fills the ground and the sky with ranked and shaken banners, the scrolls of her nativity. I stammer out music that echoes like hammers.18

Meaning, if such there is, will not give itself to the reader sequentially. The poem ends in practice of the suggestion it makes throughout, its words open, allusive, intertextual, the reader looking for hooks in W. B.

Yeats, arising with the comet, T. S. Eliot with the revenant body from The Waste Land, and Michael Longley, with the idea of the mapped body as memorial to the dead. Such 'openness' is a critical given of modern poetry. This condition often allows for writing that gives voice to the voiceless, revolving around issues of memory or recuperation. Ni

Chuilleanain's poetry might, at first reading, conform to this paradigm,

27




a view that is all the more inviting in the context of the subjects she

considers, such as the lost women of the Magdalen laundries. In the skeletal keys of the dead voices there is, to echo Gerald Dawe's phrase, a more potent music, a poetry intensely aware of representation's dead

weight. This idea begins to explain the perceived difficulty of Ni Chuilleanain's poetry which resists recuperation to any more comfortable system of reading. In 'Autun', as in much of her work, there is an abundance of imagery that is all but unreadable except in a

constellation of meanings whose co-ordinates change as quickly as the

landscapes of the poems themselves. The geography in which we situate our reading is crucial, if only to clarify where we look from. Ni Chuilleanain's poem becomes a sepulchre itself, a site of devotion between the living and the dead, a gateway, like the car radio which

brings sound waves to our hearing to form new alliances between

memory and activity 'Autun' ends not with an epiphany but activity There is no paralysis but rather action, imperfect and with all the hesitancy of commitment ? T stammer out music that echoes like hammers'.19

These images may be juxtaposed with Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford', one of late twentieth-century poetry's classic testaments against barbarity Mahon's is a vision poem, an aural

imagination of voices that clamour to be heard. Here is possession, finite and fragile, but with one crucial difference, that the visionary voice in Mahon never reaches the first person. The setting for his poem is a

de^rted outbuilding in the Irish countryside, populated, if we can say that, with mushrooms that await discovery. The idea is odd, but follows a

trope whereby the reader encounters a human voice or sentiment in an

animal or vegetable previously mute. The reorganization of the senses that follows allows for things to be said which might otherwise remain

silent, as Viktor Shklovsky argued in his comment on the speaking horses in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Mahon's poem points us to memory from its opening epigraph from Seferis, 'Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.'20 It continues to establish a distance between the living and the dead whose bridge is memory:

Even now there are places where a thought might grow ?

Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned To a slowr clock of condensation.

An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft, Indian compounds where the wind dances

And a door bangs with diminished confidence.21

The native American experience has a continued valency in Irish poetry through the work of Paul Muldoon, whose poem 'Meeting the British',

28




for example, plays upon ideas of trade and exploitation (They gave us six fishhooks/ and two blankets embroidered with smallpox').22 Similarly, Mahon envisages a place of lost peoples, whose presence in the deserted shed awaits discovery by a passing 'mycologist'.23 The

playful image, nonetheless, conveys science's inadequacy as a language for loss. 'A Disused Shed' explores images of anatomy to give the reader a sense of the mushroom's slow failure, as they wait 'in a

foetor/ of vegetable sweat',24 'the pale flesh flaking/ Into the earth that nourished it'.25 As in 'Autun', memory is articulation. Both poems cede

possession to the forgotten: in 'Autun', the dead beseech, 'Remember

us', while in 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford':

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again.

Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii 'Save us, save us', they

seem to say. 'Let the God not abandon us

Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let not our naive labours have been in vain!26

Mahon's possession is incomplete. The speaker's self-consciousness is the last barrier to the concession of voice to others who wish to speak; the pun on light meter, the equipment for a camera, or a poetry whose

rhythm is inadequate to the situation, is typical of a text that will not,

finally, let go. In this sense, 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford' constructs its own exclusions, collapsing Treblinka with Pompeii, remembering people who only 'seem to say'.27 There is no such choice of narrative in

'Autun', the speaker observing scrolls whose script we do not know, banners full of writing whose meaning we are not told. This unreadable element in Ni Chuilleanain's work is in contrast to Mahon's testamental

impulse; but it suggests an equal commitment to the recovery of

presence, which is not foreclosed by description but open 'to the version of every other'.28 This creates a sense of solidarity in Ni Chuilleanain's collection in general, an echo of hammers, a hamores lafan, the hammer's

leaving, the Old English kenning for sword that suggests a connection between art and strife. This struggle for expression continues in the

poem following 'Autun', 'Crossing the Loire', which describes, again in

visionary terms, a journey through the continent of Europe, with a

disappearing Rome as the imagined destination. The speaker imagines the companionship of female presence and again there is hope of rest from present labour:

29




I saluted the famous river as I do every year Turning south as if the plough steered,

Kicking, at the start of a new furrow, my back To the shady purple gardens with benches under plum trees

By the river that hunts between piers and sandbanks ?

I began threading the long bridge, I bowed my head And lifted my hands from the wheel for an instant of trust, I faced the long rows of vines curving up the hillside

Lightly like feathers, and longer than the swallow's flight, My road already traced before me in a dance

Of three nights and three days, Of sidestepping hills and crescent lights blinding me

(If there was a bar counter and ice and a glass, and a room

upstairs: But it rushed past me and how many early starts before The morning when the looped passes descend to the ruined

arch?).29

It is possible to stop and take the opportunity for reflection in the

speaker's imagined bar. We are in a relatively identifiable space, in the Loire valley in France, following what seems a familiar route. The idea of a journey as metaphor for mortality and of the trip from life to death is a familiar one. The scars of each experience of passage score the

display of accumulated knowledge. There remains an intertextual disturbance at work which upsets the easy amassing of summer memory the personal address to water invoking the moment of Seamus

Heaney's hymn to violence, 'North'. Hidden in Ni Chuilleanain's mid continent is an image of northern Europe that suggests another journey embedded in the dusty retreat. Crossing the Loire, Ni Chuilleanain's

speaker faces vines and vegetation. In Heaney's 'North',

I returned to a long strand, The hammered curve of a bay, And found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical Invitations of Iceland, The pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin

measured against their long swords rusting,

30




those in the solid

belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices

warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany.30

Heaney's vision is of a past that speaks to the present through the medium of violence, the earth a holding-ground for an atavistic energy that finds form in cultural production. Measured against their swords, like poets counting their light metre, the Viking raiders speak through the persistence of civil war, illuminations for Heaney's own

consideration of sectarian war and state repression in contemporary Northern Ireland. 'Crossing the Loire' seems far from these northern

waters, but Ni Chuilleanain's engagement with the historical landscape suggests a parallel awareness of a cultural geography inscribed by human presence. After taking time to think of a moment's rest,

'Crossing the Loire' charges on across the countryside, like one of those wild careers that Michael Longley has conjured to the west of Ireland. This kinetic energy summons a vision of the river before us:

She came rising up out of the water, her eyes were like sandbanks

The wrinkles in her forehead were like the flaws in the mist

(Maybe a long narrow boat with a man lying down And a rod and line like a frond of hair dripping in the stream) She was humming the song about the estuary, and the

delights Of the salt ocean, the lighthouse like a summons; and she

told me:

The land will not go to that measure, it lasts, you'll see

How the earth widens and mountains are empty, only With tracks that search and dip, from here to the city of Rome Where the road gallops up to the dome as big as the sun.

You will see your sister going ahead of you And she will not need to rest, but you must lie In the dry air of your hotel where the traffic grinds before

dawn,

The cello changing gear at the foot of the long hill, And think of the story of the suitors on horseback

Getting ready to trample up the mountain of glass.31

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The image of the suitors on horseback comes from Andrew Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book, and derives from a Polish story called 'The Glass Mountain'.32 In the tale, a rich and beautiful princess lives in a palace at the top of a glass mountain, which her suitors must climb to meet her. All die, and lie crumpled at the bottom of the slope, until a young man climbs up with the help of a lynx's claws and an eagle's flight. On

killing the eagle, the dead suitors are brought back to life, even as the

youth must live at the top of the glass mountain forever, his only means of escape gone. The failed suitors' grim anticipation of the fateful hill reads into the poem's journey from Ireland to Italy from start to finish. The melancholy trample of the European journey corresponds with the sense of life outside the window, of music and the senses, and a certain conflict between modernity and the traditions of romance, the horseback suitors situated in a landscape of traffic. The sense of

looking out brings us back to Heaney; other images and words recur as

'North', like 'Crossing the Loire', thinks of a submerged long boat, the word hammering repeating from 'Autun'. 'North' ends with a voice from 'The longship's swimming tongue',33 another river voice in the full spate of speech:

It said, 'Lie down In the word-hoard, burrow The coil and gleam Of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.

Expect aurora borealis In the long foray But no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear As the bleb of an icicle, Trust the feel of what nubbed treasure Your hands have known.'34

Heaney's voice gives direction on strategy offering a theory of writing by which the poet might measure his or her responsibility as much as

she or he has one, to community. The final refuge in what is known is

sustainable, whatever the denial, by limiting what is admissible to the sensation of touch. The ghosts that lift their voices are Sirens, threats to the stability of the speaker's perception. The poem enacts a closure that

accepts the possibility of visual illumination, that aurora borealis which lights the sky These northern lights are invisible in the southerly latitudes of 'Crossing the Loire' and in Ni Chuilleanain's geography

32



HISTORY LN THE POETRY OF EILEAN NI CHUILLEANAlN

there is an expansion of the philosophy that informs Heaney's earlier

poem. The river she describes is fluid, open, and welcoming of contact with the ocean. Such ease with fluid boundaries suggests an important development in contemporary Irish culture. The violence that so

haunted Heaney's 'North' is now, in large part, past (and we should remember all the while that Heaney's admission of violence to the civic discourse is one of the poem's major achievements in a society that otherwise tended to embalm itself in repetitive self-absolution, as if sectarianism was a sickness someone else had).

The questions Ireland faces now, of wealth and its disparities, of

immigration and its impact on national identity, demand different answers. Travelling through a Europe that is a site, like Ireland, of thousands of years of cultural construction, 'Crossing the Loire' may be read as a fording of more than a river. It is a traversing of fresh terrain that needs a new language of description. The point may be enlarged to all of Ni Chuilleanain's poems that act as maps of a landscape that still unfolds before us. Perhaps all writing considers the journey to lands unknown, and has done so since Odysseus returned from the underworld. The transformation of poetic vision in Nf Chuilleanain's work revolves around the attempt to sense that other place in a form of

language that does not constrict. As the speaker wonders in 'Inheriting the Books',

Who is that in flashing garments Bowing to the earth over and over, Is it a woman or a child? In the wedge of the valley by the stream

What food are they cooking, what names have they For washing the dead, for the days of the week?35

We do not know the answers to these questions, as we do not know who these people are. This does not matter; meaning is made from the

rags and threads of memory, fragile, fraying, and capable of being retied according to necessity. Necessity even seems too restrictive a

word to describe a poetry that is allusive, mournful, playful, and

cryptic, a practice that returns over and over to sites of transformation,

emerging, in Ni Chuilleanain's words, 'from the shadows of the

expected masculine forms'.36 Which is not to say there is no masculine trace at all. Just as the poet's own father used to write letters to her in

Irish, English, French, and Latin,37 so the scribe in the final lines of

'Gloss/ Clos/ Glas' approaches a point where language is silence,

meaning a blank that registers presence without form. The surprise of this insight prompts the subject to use other senses, listening now, not

reading. He hears breath, the intake and outtake a rhythm parallel to

33




poetry: the invisible air leaves its effect on a metal surface turned green, as if rusted by the persistent exhalation, all in a present expansion of time to the future. The realization of the limits of language is a first step to freedom. The ending of 'Gloss/ Clos/ Glas' sums up the ruminations on the question of history in Ni Chuilleanain's poetry as it urges us to

apprehend plural, parallel presents and a time filled by now:

The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes, Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words

Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat

Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly, Until he reaches the language that has no word for his, No word for hers, and is brought up sudden Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.

Who is that he can hear panting on the other side? The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.38

NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969),

p.261. 2. Leslie Williams, '"The Stone Recalls its Quarry": An Interview with Eilean Ni

Chuilleanain', in Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, edited by Susan

Shaw Sailor (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 1997), p.29. 3. Irene Gilsenan Nordin, "'Betwixt and Between": The Body as Liminal Threshold in

the Poetry of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain', The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish

Poetry, edited by Irene Gilsenan Nordin (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), p.230. 4. Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, 'In Her Other House', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer

(Winston Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2002), p. 13.

5. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.13. 6. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.l. 7. 'Peace in the Mountains', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p. 10.

8. Tn Her Other House', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.3. 9. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.l3. 10. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.l3. 11. Tn Her Other Ireland', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p. 14.

12. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p. 14.

13. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p. 14.

14. 'Autun', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.26. 15. Liz O'Connor, Irish Times, 12 June 1940, p.40. 16. 'Autun', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.26. 17. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.26. 18. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, pp.26-7. 19. The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.27. 20. Derek Mahon, 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery

Press, 1999), p.89. 21. Collected Poems, p.89. 22. Paul Muldoon, 'Meeting the British', Meeting the British (London: Faber, 1987), p. 16.

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23. 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', Collected Poems, p.89. 24. 'A Disused Shed in Co. WTexford', Collected Poems, p.89. 25. 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', Collected Poems, p.90. 26. 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', Collected Poems, p.90. 27. 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', Collected Poems, p.90. 28. Tn Her Other House', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.13. 29. 'Crossing the Loire', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.28. 30. Seamus Heaney, 'North', Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar,

Strauss, and Giroux, 1998), p.98. 31. 'Crossing the Loire', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, pp.28-9. 32. I am grateful to Eilean Ni Chuilleanain for pointing out this source. 'The Glass

Mountain', The Yellow Fairy Book, edited by Arthur Lang (London: Longmans, 1929),

pp.145-9. 33. Seamus Heaney, 'North', Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, pp.98-9. 34. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, pp.98-9. 35. 'Inheriting the Books', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.35. 36. Leslie Williams, 'The Stone Recalls its Quarry', p.43. 37. Leslie Williams, 'The Stone Recalls its Quarry', p.30. 38. 'Gloss/ Clos/ Glas', The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, p.40.

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