Ni chuilleanain essay

She then attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and received her Bachelor of Literature in 1968. A Catholic, Ní Chuilleanáin ironically titled her first poetry collection Acts and Monuments (1972), borrowing the name from John Foxe's sixteenth-century historiography of English Protestantism, also known as the Book of Martyrs.

Ní Chuilleanáin was the international winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2010, an award that reflects her high standing outside of Ireland, and in 2016 she was appointed to the position of Ireland Chair of Poetry. The judges for the Griffin Prize described her as “a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative.”

Since the 1990s, Ní Chuilleanáin has been increasingly regarded as central to discussions about Irish poetry, especially those concerning constructions of female identity. Haberstroh 2013 is a landmark study on this particular theme in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, building on Haberstroh 1996 and Haberstroh 2001.

In the title poem from Site of Ambush, Ní Chuilleanáin uses this ability to capture a scene and keep it still, to give the reader a glimpse of war-torn Ireland. The Second Voyage (1977) deals more with motion than with stasis. It contains poems from both of Ní Chuilleanáin's first two collections as well as new poems.