SOURCE: “Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, 1998, pp. 76-100.

In the following essay, Kerrigan studies how the history of Ireland's Munster region, and past writers from this area, have affected Ní Chuilleanáin's writing.

During the 1970s, as the Troubles took hold in Northern Ireland, the work of Heaney and his contemporaries was projected by London publishers to an international audience. Here was a poetry authenticated by crisis, which addressed the conditions of violence in ways which the media could understand. In the Republic, where readerships were small and the machinery of publishing exiguous, the success of the Ulster poets was viewed with a mixture of admiration and dismay. Despite the evolving integrity of Thomas Kinsella's modernism, and the innovativeness, in Gaelic, of Michael Davitt, Liam Ó Muirthile and others, there had to be a suspicion that poetry was...