SOURCE: A review of The Magdalene Sermon, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 69, Summer, 1995, pp. 148-56.

In the following excerpt, Stanfield examines Ní Chuilleanáin's use of mobility and stasis in her poetry and describes how this inertia makes Ní Chuilleanáin's poems powerful.

Irish poets stand a good chance to get a fair hearing in the United States, not only when compared to poets of other foreign countries, but even when compared to our own. Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Derek Mahon receive notice in such venues as the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, which are rather miserly in the column inches they accord books of poetry. In the less highly visible but hardly less estimable world of quarterlies and workshops, Thomas Kinsella and John Montague have long been known names. Mention of Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Tom Paulin, or Aidan Matthews...