Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin | Roaringwater Journal

Like Brian Lalor, the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin*grew up in Cork in a house alive with art, scholarship and republican ideals, in a city yet to emerge into modernity. As a poet she returns often to the subject of Cork, immersed from childhood, as Brian, in its unique character. She has said . . . there is a poetry, and I include my own, which can only be written out of the sense of the absolute proximity of the real past, and the place which is home, from which history can be seen.

In a poem that begins ‘In the graveyards of the city’ she writes,

Tablets fixed on their boundary walls,

They are shouldered by tall square houses

Chimneys nodding to each other

Over the heads of gesturing

Angels, all back and no sex.

And we instantly see what she describes, although we hadn’t before.

In 2007 the poet and critic Thomas McCarthy wrote in the Irish University Review**:

The Gallery Press book, Cork, was certainly one of the most beautiful local books of 1977. Written to accompany Brian Lalor’s subtle, and sometimes very slight, drawings of Cork, the poems were full of a sunlit magic. The book itself, as an object, was one of Gallery Press’s finest hours. It marked a restoration of dignity to the world of Irish poetry publishing just at the moment when standards of production and presentation had begun to decline everywhere. I remember the display copies of the limited hardback of this book in the old Cork Craftsman’s Guild shop in Patrick Street: how fine it looked, how fitting it was that this volume of poems and drawings was displayed with the best ceramics and wood-cuts of the day. The opening poem is probably as complete an evocation of Cork as will ever get published:

The island, with its hooked

Clamps of bridges holding it down

Its internal spirals

Packed as tight as a ship

With a name in Greek or Russian on its tail

In a lingua franca of water –

And now the river, flat and luminous

At its fullest, images the defences:

Ribbed quays and stacked roofs

Plain warehouse walls as high as churches

Insolent flights of steps

Within are narrow lanes, man high

Flagged and flattened

By the prudent stonecutters, . . .

McCarthy concludes, It is a perfect description, pencil-like and deftly matched to the delicate drawings of Lalor. The latter give Ní Chuilleanáin free rein; they allow her to soar with that light method, the elusive and evocative, and even retiring, loose line.

Eiléan’s Cork of the 1970s is just as convoluted as Brian Lalor’s. In a 2008 essay*** she describes it thus:

There are gestures at consistency. But much of the city is a haphazard succession of buildings dating from a mixture of periods, still following the medieval pattern of streets and laneways, crammed on their island site, churches, markets and houses. On the hills that surrounded the town suburbs grew up: some respectable, terraces with British Army names recalling Wellington and Waterloo, inhabited by the officers from the barracks higher up again; some grim and filthy with names like Brandy Lane, Spudtown, Cat Lane. I still remember the smell of the lanes and tenements, the public houses and their truculent customers, the shadowy shawled women making off down an entry clutching drink or money with equal desperation.

One of her poems seems to translate these thoughts from prose. As McCarthy puts it, Psychologically and socially, Ní Chuilleanáin’s Cork is a complex and evasive place, made concrete only through the most intense observation

Geometry of Guilt, the windows

Broken or always empty;

Daylight sucked in and lost, a bird astray;

The knife edge of the street, blinded

Fronts of houses like a baconslicer

Dropping to infinity, down

Draughty quays and frozen bridges

And the facades are curves of seeping stone

As damp as a scullery

Or a child’s game of windows and doors arranged

Matching the caves of womb and skull

I will finish with another of McCarthy’s astute assessments of Eiléan’s work: Ni Chuilleanain maintains a psychic bridge between two cranky and petulant discourses, Dublin and Cork. Her poems have become that undelivered Golden Box, forever on its way from Cork to the good Dean, a box of poems which, when opened, reveals sunlight, cloisters, avenues, water channels, and sites of ambush.

We are soft-footed and busy as dogs

Disappearing down alleyways,

The faces I meet are warped with meaning.

We turn away from each other,

Our shoulders are smooth as the plaster veils of statues

That are turning their backs in the windows and doors.

As in the previous post, Cork, Part 1: Brian Lalor, all the drawings are by Brian Lalor and reproduced here by permission of the artist.

*Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is pronounced (approximately) Elaine Nee Quillinawn

**‘We Could Be in Any City’: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cork Author(s): Thomas McCarthy Source: Irish University Review , Spring – Summer, 2007, Vol. 37, No. 1, Edinburgh University Press (Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/25517350

***Home and Places, in Home/Lands, A collection of essays commissioned by the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa to mark the third New Symposium held on the island of Paros, Greece, in May 2008.

In 1973 and 1974 the artist and writer, Brian Lalor, made a series of drawings of Cork, his native city. These drawings were published by the Gallery Press in 1977, along with poems by the Cork poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, in a book simply titled Cork. Both poet and artist/writer were already established and both have gone on to forge distinguished careers in Irish art and literature.

Grand Parade

I have owned a copy of this book since 1978 – a birthday gift from my mother. Knowing of my love for the city of Cork, my home for seven years, she mailed it to me in Canada. I have cherished it ever since. The copy she posted to me was signed by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. This year, seated in our living room overlooking Rossbrin Cove, Brian Lalor signed it for me too.

Brian’s drawings of his (and my) beloved Cork capture a city on the edge of modernising. He has graciously given me permission to reproduce some of his drawings in these posts and I will use his own words (from A Note on the Drawings at the end of the book) since they capture so much better than I ever could his fascination with the city and his intentions in recording its idiosyncratic character.

The South Gate Bridge. That couple looks familiar

This collection of drawings developed as a result of a habit of many years, begun in Cork and fostered in Europe and the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, a habit of of never passing a laneway, flight of stairs, courtyard or public building without investigating what secrets it might conceal, what historical or human curiosity might be within. Coming then to Cork in the early seventies and finding it a city reeling from the cataclysm of “urban renewal,” it seemed an appropriate time to attempt a record of the inconsequential details which made up the character of the place, while the opportunity still existed.

Upper: Paradise Place. Lower: Curry’s Rock. Older women still wore the traditional shawl in the early 70s and were known as Shawlies

This is not Cork seen from its public face but from above and behind, not just observed in its principal role as the second city of the Republic but sought out in all its idiosyncrasies and individuality. The monuments of Architecture, memorials to wealth and power, religious fervour and civic pride will not be found here, except when they creep in by accident for, avoiding the European grand manner, they block no vista nor crown a Summit. Rather, they lurk in unexpected places and just spring upon one, owing their location principally to occupying the sites of earlier ecclesiastical foundations. This latter fact is the clue to understanding the city of Cork, the link with the past. For it was in the periods of its earliest habitation that the considerations of commerce, security and the political existences of the time gave rise to what held as the nucleus of the city up to the present day.

Cornmarket Street

Cork was never a planned city; it grew organically from the meanderings of the River Lee through the marshlands of the depression between the surrounding hills. Its streets and by-ways follow today those of the middle ages, and the water channels which gave access from the early town to the outer expenses of the river basin. The line which runs from the Episcopal seat of Shandon to that of Saint Finbarr’s was the principal artery of the ancient city of Cork, as it is today nine centuries later. It is around this thread that the drawings are gathered. This line held the centre of all life within the city from its foundation in the tenth century, to the late nineteenth, and even today what is outside this line is peripheral to the soul of the city.

St Patrick’s Quay

Next week, the poetry. . .