SOURCE: “How Things Begin to Happen: Notes on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian,” in Southern Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 450-67.

In the following excerpt, Sirr examines Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry and analyzes her ability to blend different styles of poetry and various images to create imaginative poems.

Given the full range of what has been possible in verse in our century, Irish poetry is essentially conservative. It tends to avoid formal experiment, jealously hoards its clarities, its logic, its trove of paraphrasable content. Think, for instance, of the effective marginalisation of Thomas Kinsella, who has stoically pushed the modernist legacy to the bemusement (albeit respectful) of a good many fellow-poets and to the relative indifference of critics. A well-established cliché is to regret his departure from the plangent if derivative lyricism of Another September into the muddy modernist waters of the later work; to...