SOURCE: “Poetry from the Irish,” in Irish Literary Supplement, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1991, p. 14.

In the following excerpt, Allison praises Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry for its grace and simplicity.

In [Ciaran] Carson's world, language is deceptive and meaning is unstable, but in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry language is serenely confident and comfortable in its relationship to the world and to the fictions it brings into being. The language of The Magdalene Sermon is simple, uncluttered and limpid, and Ní Chuilleanáin's poems are graceful and marvellously unfussy; she seems incapable of writing a superfluous line. She doesn't use figurative language very much, but when she does it is apt and fine: “Our tall pine where cones clung like mussels” (“The Italian Kitchen”). Usually her poems encapsulate a telling scene from a larger untold narrative, and aptly many of the poems have titles like those of paintings: “River...