Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

"One of our most beloved contemporary poets", is how former Ireland Professor of Poetry Paula Meehan describes Philip Casey (1950-2018). Cherished by many for his tenderness, fortitude, hope and tenacity, Philip was an award-winning novelist, admired poet and vital presence on the Irish literary scene for four decades. Philip battled repeated health challenges, stood up for causes he believed in, and relished making mischief. He was, in the words of the poet Theo Dorgan, "some man for one man". Philip believed in the idea of a community of writers, and his open-mindedness drew others towards him - whether to his Dublin home, or to his grassroots support base in his earlier home of Hollyfort, Co Wexford. His booming laugh and powerful handshake were legendary. The many contributors, including Sebastian Barry, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Dermot Bolger, Moya Cannon and Thomas Lynch, praise Philip Casey's gifts as a writer of poetry and fiction, as well as highlighting their admiration for him as a man.

In The Map of the World, Eil an N Chuillean in 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 N Chuillean in writes Shakespeare's Caliban into Irish alongside the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu. 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).

Pandemia being a land or planet whose name derives from the word pandemic. This is an anthology of brilliant work by both established and emerging poets from across the English-speaking world, from Australia to India, Europe to North America. With its accounts of life changed utterly, lives abruptly finished, testimonies of the poignancy, the loneliness and sometimes madness of lockdown, this book is an essential statement of record on the dark times we are living through.

The seventh instalment in the Poet's Chair series, it is Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's tenure as Ireland's Professor of Poetry that provides the pretext for this book, a collection of three essays exploring the forces that affect the work of every practising poet. The first essay pays tribute to a valued friend and colleague of Ni Chuilleanain's, the late Pearse Hutchinson, as well as to the languages he used and the impact they had even on readers that did not fully understand them. The second looks at the response of the reader of poetry and at the often disparaging treatment of the poet in fiction, from P. G. Wodehouse to Flann O'Brien. In the third lecture, Ni Chuilleanain returns to her lifelong academic interest in the poetry of seventeenth-century England and calls on the work of poets as diverse as Bishop Henry King, Walt Whitman and Thomas Kinsella to explore poetry's relation to the ceremonies surrounding death in how it may both comment on and substitute for ritual. Elegantly designed and masterfully written, Instead of a Shrine offers a unique opportunity to return to - or, indeed, begin engaging with - the dynamic world of poetry.

Eil an N Chuillean in's The Sun-fish deftly displays the poet's gift for the allegorical, verging at times on parable, yet always with a sense of lived experience and a strong acknowledgement of the everyday. From the dedicatory epithalamium to the concluding poem, N Chuillean in's enigmatic verse exudes deep but unpretentious wisdom, often asking simple questions that demand complex answers. In poems on nature, writing, folklore, religion, love and grief, and on many homes in different places, we are taught to "see who is there / In the whirling dance" so that we may trace the line between illusion and reality and grasp the "moment thinning the curtain, / Real, like the tricks of light." Winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Eil an N Chuillean in's The Sun-fish deftly displays the poet's gift for the allegorical, verging at times on parable, yet always with a sense of lived experience and a strong acknowledgement of the everyday. From the dedicatory epithalamium to the concluding poem, N Chuillean in's enigmatic verse exudes deep but unpretentious wisdom, often asking simple questions that demand complex answers. In poems on nature, writing, folklore, religion, love and grief, and on many homes in different places, we are taught to "see who is there / In the whirling dance" so that we may trace the line between illusion and reality and grasp the "moment thinning the curtain, / Real, like the tricks of light." Winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Eil an N Chuillean in's Selected Poems gathers poems from six collections of poetry, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), and proves that she is one of the major poets in Ireland. While her numerous images of mythical figures, travelers, pilgrims, and women--especially of the veiled subject of the nun--remind us of our deepest inner sanctum, with its litany of spiritual truths, human fears and needs, these images also catalogue the importance of the ordinary and the domestic as new metaphors for human experiences and emotions. N Chuillean in allows those who have been silenced in history to surface in art as surreal but living presences.

A renowned Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has published 7 collections of poetry. Born in Cork City in 1942, her collections include Acts and Monuments (1972), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), The Brazen Serpent (1994) and The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001). This new selection brings together some of her most distinctive work, published for the first time in the UK.

In The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, Eil an N Chuillean in radically redesigns the language and form of poetic narrative. In poems about journeys to worlds real and metaphorical, she reveals deft crossings of borders, linguistic boundaries, and cultures, from the sepulchre of Lazarus to the web of a spider "who makes her own new centre every day." Beginning mid-journey, the poems often arrive at mysterious destinations. Throughout the volume, N Chuillean in displaces the finger posts of narrative which is redefined of a traveler's productive strayings and even self-exiles: "I follow the road that follows the lie of the land."