The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Winner of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Although The Map of the World abounds in the tales half-told or hinted at for which Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is widely admired this book reaches further into the ways one might confront misfortune and disaster and the whole weight of history. Her images present ideas about how to engage with the past and about other genres’ representations of it.
Already celebrated poems such as ‘St Brigid’s Well’ and ‘Muriel Gifford After Her Fever’ mix with lines prompted by Milton and Marvell and the artists Nano Reid and Helen Moloney to ‘hold in view / history’s patched lining, the sewing’. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s corruscating poems are like no one else’s: ‘a stream is venturing a brisk melody’. So satisfying is the experience of this poet’s art a new collection of poems by her is an occasion for rejoicing.
‘Deeply attuned to poetry as an art of memory, metaphor and metamorphosis, the poet of The Map of the World writes both from the uncharted depths of grief and at the height of her powers, with an extraordinary command of line and colour and an unmatched ethical vision to capture, “the light /that also falls when there’s nobody there to see it” (What Happened Next?). Though a slim volume, this is an immense, light-filled, multilayered book of tremendous musical sensitivity, elegiac feeling and visual intensity, that succeeds, as John Berger’s Monet aspired, “to paint not things in themselves but the air that touched them”.’ – Maria Johnston, The Irish Times
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