SOURCE: “Nearer by Keeping Still,” in The Times Literary Supplement, December 25, 1987, p. 1435.

In the following review, Wills compliments Ní Chuilleanáin's technique and notes her use of the themes of movement and stillness.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry has been well received in her native Ireland, and The Second Voyage, comprising poems from her three volumes published there (it has been edited by Peter Fallon and is published in Dublin by Fallon's Gallery Books), is a welcome selection of her work for English readers. It displays a striking consistency of theme and technique—the dominant motif throughout being the contrast between movement and stasis. For Ní Chuilleanáin everything shifts, alters and progresses if only you will let it. So “The Lady's Tower” depicts a still-life in a fury of activity; walls slice downwards, “cellars plumb / Behind me shifting the oblique veins of the hill”. This mobile...