title: Selected Poems | Eil&eacute;an N&iacute; Chuillean&aacute;in
author:  Eil&eacute;an N&iacute; Chuillean&aacute;in 
description: In 'Gloss / Cls / Glas,' a poem originally published in The Girl who Married the Reindeer, and placed at the close of the new Selected Poems, the mystic material grows out of a traditional portrait. The poem portrays a scholar who, as he works in his study researching etymologies, experiences a kind of transformation. Here are the last ten lines:<br><br> The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,<br> Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns<br> Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words<br> Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat<br> Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,<br> Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,<br> No word for hers, and is brought up sudden<br> Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.<br> Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?<br> The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.<br><br>I love how effortlessly N Chuilleanin collapses the usual divisions between intellect and imagination: she has the books turn animal, even while she develops the transforming simile, the dream transport, with studious and exacting care. Masterful sentence structure carries the whole passage: for instance, the participle pouring, which at first seems expressionistic and strange, becomes lucid and naturalistic when repeated. This ending depicts a moment when the delineating power of language fails, as opposites of age and gender approach one another in a near epiphany. And yet the whole poem itself is about the power of words. --Peter Campion, Poetry<br /><br />Admired in Ireland since the 1970s, Ni Chuilleanain...deserves American attention too. ...[D]rawn to visionary experience, yet alert to domestic and urban detail, she looks at once inward to things of the spirit and outward to coastlines, Continental Europe and an omnipresent sea. ... Her visionary sentences favor soft consonants and muffled stops, without rhyme: their tones vary from celebratory to bitter, from the openly prayerful to the curtly appalled. ... --Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review
zlib_text: AN chuid is fearr de sccalta shean-Phádraic uí 
  Chonaire, arna mbailiú le chéile ag Tomás de 
  Bhaldraithe, atá anseo. Tá réamhrá leis an eagarthóir 
  sa leabhar freisin, agus athchló ar aiste Sheosaimh 
  mhic Ghrianna ar Phádraic ó Conaire. Ó tharla go 
  bhfuil an chuid is mó de shaothar shean-Phádraic as 
  cló le fada, cuireadh an-fháilte roimh an gcéad 
  eagran den leabhar seo.
  ‘You have in Pádraicó Conaire absolutely the only 
  writing you can imagine a European reading,’ a dúirt 
  Stiofán mac Enna i bhfad ó shin. Ar éigean is fíor 
  sin anois, ach tugann an leabhar seo deis sean- 
  Phádraig a chur i gcomórtas le scríbhneoirí an lae 
  inniu.
  Ní gá a rá go bhfuil na scéalta anseo go ceirdiúil, géar- 
  chúiseach, i bhfad thar an gcoiteann— Irish Independent.
  Having read these stories some thirty or forty years ago, 
  and having thought them good then, 1 find on reading 
  them with a riper mind that I think them better, and that 
  suggests that Pádraic could take his place among the 
  classics.— Dubl