SOURCE: “‘Our Bodies' Eyes and Writing Hands:’ Secrecy and Sensuality in Ní Chuilleanáin's Baroque Art,” in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997, pp. 187-211.

In the following essay, Johnston examines Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry in comparison to Eavan Bolard's poetry, in view of religious overtones and in a study of sexuality.

In her autobiographical treatise, “The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time,” Eavan Boland remarks that “Irish women poets had gone from being the objects of the Irish poem to being its authors in a relatively short space of time.”¹ That final spatializing locution offers a clue as to why the most respected women poets in Ireland represent this shift they have undergone—from aesthetic object to poetic subject—in terms of painting. Boland herself, Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin vocalize the once-mute objects...