In "Love and Friendship," her essay on Gaelic love poetry composed between the fourteenth and early-eighteenth century, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin explained and lauded the "mystery" of those poems in that they "expose just as much as the poet permits--they have a reticence, a quality of anonymity that gives them half their strength." She might, coincidentally, have been speaking of her own poetry although "reticence" and "anonymity" do not always or necessarily afford a strength, but often lend an obliquity to her poetry's intensely imagined, private, and frequently mysterious world. Sixteen years prior to this essay, in the poem "Ars Poetica," one of the four poems for which she won the Irish Times Poetry Award in 1966, Ní Chuilleanáin declared that "a poem is/singular and exclusive as a man's death." In her five books of poetry published to date, she has...