SOURCE: “One Free Foot Kicking,” in The Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1995, p. 13.

In the following excerpt, Matthews favorably reviews The Brazen Serpent, stating that Ní Chuilleanáin's lyrics blend factual history and magical poetry.

The relations between poetry and history, between the personal space of the lyric and the painful facts of public event, have inevitably formed an exacerbating focus of attention in Irish writing of the past two-and-a-half decades. In these recent books from the Gallery Press, two major poets take up the strains of those relations in striking and suggestive ways which extend the range of possibilities offered within this fraught territory.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's The Brazen Serpent dramatizes moments in which the mystical, the unseen or the unheard press on the known and the mundane. But these are lyrics concerned also with the difficulties, the thinnings and emptyings-out involved with all processes of...