SOURCE: “Contemporary Women Poets in Ireland,” in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 18, No. 1-2, 1985, pp. 103-13.

In the following excerpt, Henigan discusses Ní Chuilleanáin's technique and her ability to write about the positive and negative aspects of life.

Like Líadan and Eileen O'Leary, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin is from Cork. She is the daughter of a professor of Irish and the prolific novelist Eilis Dillon. Although her poems are highly regarded in Ireland, American critics have been, at best, condescending. They complain that her poems are not distinctively Irish, that her syntax is elliptical to the point of obscurity, that her images are extreme or unsupported by rhetoric, or that her talent is buried in cliches.¹ But poet James Simmons, who included her work in his 1974 anthology Ten Irish Poets, wrote that “she has a lovely imagination with a sort of hard-boiled magic touch, manifesting on pages...