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The Map of the World by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
• Winner of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award
• Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
“[T]his is an immense, light-filled, multilayered book of tremendous musical sensitivity, elegiac feeling and visual intensity.”
— Maria Johnston, The Irish Times
“Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems often have the recollected mystery and vividness of dream-visions: eccentric fables that gleam, nevertheless, in their own clear glow.”
— Ciarán O’Rourke, Dublin Review of Books
“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry works like memory, situating itself between what is real and what insists on being named as real, reaching a sharpened significance with each successive return. Questioning the certainty of our perceptions, her poems meditate on the nature of truth and reality; questioning whether we are what we think we are, they are also philosophical explorations of identity.”
— Carmen Bugan, Harvard Review
About the Book
In The Map of the World, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin continues her vital work “to hold in view / history’s patched lining, the sewing.” Within this patchwork, there are pilgrimages to holy wells, bishops and bookbinders, and poems in conversation with writers and artists, from Andrew Marvell, Milton, and Joyce to Irish painter Nano Reid and stained-glass artist Helen Moloney.
There are also deft translations, as Ní Chuilleanáin writes Shakespeare’s Caliban into Irish alongside the Romanian poet Ileana Mălăncioiu. Other poems evoke a darker urgency of war, displacement, and ecological precarity. Yet, perhaps the most compelling moments are uncovered in the collection’s intimate elegies, from “Muriel Gifford After Her Fever” to “The Ash-tree at My Window,” in which there is “No need to make sense” of loss, only a sublime petition: “Please, / hide me in summer.”
In this volume, the first since her Collected Poems (2021), we find a poet writing “both from the uncharted depths of grief and at the height of her powers” (The Irish Times).
About the Author
Born in Cork in 1942, Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is Professor Emeritus of English and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, having previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Letters) before her retirement in 2011. From 2016–2019 she also served as the Ireland Professor of Poetry, and in 2022 she was elected Saoi by the Irish artists’ association Aosdána, their highest honor. Ní Chuilleanáin is a co-founder of the literary journal Cyphers. She is often cited not only as a major poet in the generation after Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Richard Murphy, but also as the foremost female poet now writing in Ireland and Great Britain.
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