The 1970s and 1980s were decades of intense culture wars in Ireland, as the feminist movement did battle with the forces of conservatism over a host of high-profile constitutional issues. It was also a period of feminist awakening in Irish poetry. The poetry of Eavan Boland entered this world somewhat tentatively, beginning to establish its suburban terrain and slowly shedding the more static aspects of that writer’s juvenilia. A very different poet is Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose dominant note was from the outset one of uncertainty, searching, and transition. Where Boland will focus on the theme of unrecoverable women’s lives, Ní Chuilleanáin will typically be found actively recovering submerged and lost stories and lives. Medbh McGuckian’s approach is different again, and is often characterised in terms of écriture féminine, though scholarship of her extensive use of intertextuality has added new layers of complexity to our understanding of her work. Other poets, including Nuala Archer, Paula Meehan and Rita Ann Higgins, round out this survey of a busy and radical chapter in the history of modern Irish women’s poetry.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has long had a reputation for obliquity, and in approaching her work we will often find she withholds as much as she discloses. Ní Chuilleanáin’s frequent ekphrastic poems and recourse to metaphors of framing are also ways of rephrasing the central question of what a poem is, and how to approach lyric form afresh. Her focus on art works frequently transports the reader to a pre-Renaissance world, which Ní Chuilleanáin finds temperamentally conducive in her warm visions of Mediterranean Catholicism, and in the stress in her critical writings as well as her poetry on questions of embodiment and revealed truth. Music and architecture are frequent reference points, sometimes via the metaphysical poets, before Ní Chuilleanáin puts her distinctive and personal stamp on these themes. Hers is a complex art, but one whose façade of secrecy provides the necessary theatrical backdrop while Ní Chuilleanáin probes and reinvents received ideas of the woman poet in the Irish tradition.