The late Peter Porter had a peculiar blind spot where modern Irish poetry was concerned. Irish poets, he suggested in 1992, write as though “marooned outside time”, “playing up to some committee preparing a Pantheon” rather than deigning to enter the 20th-century. On a casual reading, there is little in the work of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin that might have shaken Porter out of his prejudice. Where are the poems about austerity Ireland, its failed banks and ghost estates? The speaker of “Somewhere Called Goose Bay” appears too preoccupied with the past to address these concerns, “since to my own mind / I appear to have been born in 1870 / and schooled in 1689”. Other poems explore nuns’ veils, the “card-playing codes” of a long-ago prisoner in an internment camp, and the mythical Queen Méabh surveying the plains of Louth. The opening words of “Witness” are “Why doesn’t she speak when they ask her / what has happened?” Why doesn’t Ní Chuilleanáin speak more directly about contemporary Ireland?
The short answer is that these poems’ rootings around in the past do not come at the expense of an engagement with the modern world. On the contrary, they are exercises in historical memory, providing invaluable points of entry into the larger forces that shape our lives today. The opening poem of The Boys of Bluehill, “An Information”, recalls MacNeice’s “Soap Suds”, experiencing the return of the past as an immediate physical sensation. The past is a lost object, dropped from a child’s hand, but Ní Chuilleanáin counsels a relaxed attitude towards its recovery: “do not look back to see whose hand / finds it, or where it is hidden again when found.”
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