Site of Ambush

by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Some light wear to paper wraps, designed by Michael Kane. good internally, clean and unmarked.

37 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the daughter of a writer and a professor who fought in the Irish War of Independence. She earned a BA and MA at University College Cork and also studied at Oxford University.

Ní Chuilleanáin uses transformative, sweeping metaphor to invert the structures of interior, natural, and spiritual realms. In a 2009 interview for Wake Forest University Press, Ní Chuilleanáin states, “The question I ask myself constantly is ‘is this real? Do I really believe this, do I really feel this?’ But that is a question I cannot answer except by trying again in a poem.” Awarding Ní Chuilleanáin the 2010 Griffin Prize, the judges noted, "She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes. […] Each poem is a world complete, and often they move between worlds, as in the beautiful ‘A Bridge between Two Counties.’ These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us."

Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; The Magdalene Sermon (1989), which was selected as one of the three best poetry volumes of the year by the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Book Prize Committee; Selected Poems (2009); and The Sun-fish (2010). She translated Ileana Malancioiu’s After the Raising of Lazarus (2005) and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001, co-translated with Medbh McGuckian). Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has been featured in several anthologies, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry, 1967-2000 (1999, edited by Peggy O’Brien).

Since 1975 she has edited the literary magazine Cyphers, and she has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. She has taught at Trinity College Dublin since 1966. With her husband, poet Macdara Woods, she divides her time between Ireland and Italy.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the key to this book was the title poem, where Ní Chuilleanáin considers the story around this one battle that was prevented by an ambush. I'm not sure the exact battle. And not knowing has not stood in the way of reading this poem, because the poem is mainly concerned with a panhistorical view of any specific event. Not just what happened then, but how has it changed people's lives since then? How has the landscape grown around it? What would it mean to recall the children who had been inadvertently killed in this ambush? A poem can read history in many different ways. And Ní Chuilleanáin shows how this can happen in a few different poems.

But it's reading how she uses nature in those poems, then applying it to the other poems in the book, depicting nature with a subtle mystery to it, that I find the most interesting readings. Between the portrayal of nature and the panhistorical framing from "Sites of Ambush," I see how Ní Chuilleanáin elaborates on the role nature poems can have in poetry. Where nature poetry is often fascinated with an other-ing of nature, proposing the fullness a person feels in nature as a refuge removing someone from their hectic life among people. Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems consider the presence of nature as evidence that history has occurred in this place. It occurs in expected ways, where nature overtaking what was made by people shows the enduring nature of nature. But the historic role of nature occurs in unexpected ways, too. The many ways an ocean appears, for instance. Something that marks a boundary. Something nurturing and supporting animal life. Something that can appear with many different complexions. How her poems can depict ocean as a natural phenomenon and as an unlikely marker of human history hopefully describes how complex the relation between nature and human history.