Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Poetry and Water

If the coast and sea are to be more than settings for the play of literature, and if in doing so become the fabric of an aesthetic whose origins are in the interplay between water and land, then something more is to be read into art than a juxtaposition between fluidity and form. Liquidity is a condition of continual engagement, surface and depth, volume and elevation, are the dimensions of a literature that can hold a multiple consciousness in mind, the art work an astrolabe, not a map, its contours marked by soundings, its horizons by visions. This chapter reads the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in these contexts, following words and images from Acts and Monuments to the present. Ní Chuilleanáin is a central figure in contemporary Irish literature; associative and versatile, her work seeps around any reading of narrative enclosure.