A Reading by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ireland Professor of Poetry, at UCD

it gives me great pleasure to introduce Elaine Lee Cullinan Ireland professor of poetry who was is reading for us tonight the Ireland professorship of poetry was established 20 years ago in 1998 to honor the achievements of Irish poets and to celebrate Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize for Literature the chair was set up as a partnership between the two Arts Council's in Ireland north and south and between three universities Queen's University Belfast Trinity College Dublin and UCD the professor spends a term of residence at each University during their three-year tenure Elaine Aquila gnome is the seventh holder of this professorship and is currently based in Trinity she will give her second annual lecture in T City on the 14th of March we in UCD very much look forward to welcoming her here for her term of residence with us this coming academic year I'm also very pleased to welcome two trustees of the Ireland chair of poetry who were here this evening Sheila Patrick who's chair of the Arts Council and Mary Clayton Elaine equally known poet scholar essayist and translator was born in Cork and is an emerges hello of Trinity College Dublin where she has had a distinguished career as a teacher and researcher of Renaissance literature and translation she is also a founder and co-editor of the long-running Irish poetry journal ciphers she is the author of eight main poetry collections two days and two selected poems one which I have here these range from her powerful debut collection acts and monuments in 1972 with this characteristic longing for escape from pre-established heavily consequential social cultural and philosophical modes of being to quote from the title poem where no unformed capricious cry can sound without its monument her career as a poet has moved all the way to her most recent publication the boys of blue hill published in 2015 in this visionary volume the mercurial quick of life itself can be touched in the very face of loss and danger here to quote from her poem julia shrine and a cement mixer the world is a breathing surface a rippling a fragrance like spice enticing from the kitchen a pulse beating behind the embroidered veil one of Elena Quillin owns central interests is the inner psychological experience of those who have undergone physical mental or spiritual pain focusing on the body in time she vividly communicates the texture of post-colonial Irish psychic history our poetry attends to many buried voices in our culture these include the close range voices of loved ones who have gone through a serious illness and death and the longer-range voices of Irish people at points of extraordinary historical pressure especially following the collapse of the Gaelic order in the 17th century during the counter-reformation period and opposed to dependents bourgeois 20th century Ireland like the maudlin women the modern laundry women in her poem translations such ghostly presences remain discomforting ridges under the veil of the national story they will not stay still they are active mobile shifting presences presences searching for their names as her poem Bess / reminds us as long as such dark history remained unacknowledged quote the blood that was sown here flowered and all the seeds blew away receding in further trauma thus her work calls for the reintegration of national gendered and individual loss as part of our ongoing story she recognizes that hidden worlds have their own voices on registerable on the wavelength of dominant agendas she explores the complexity therefore of witnessing to serve to suffering this involves a particular quest for precision for and I'm quoting here from her poem glass closed + words closer to the bone than the words I was so proud of this means finding words pouring and slippery like a silk ties of the Tomcat pouring through the slit in the fence the fence that divides us from truth over and over in her work solid and stable understandings called to be infiltrated by fluid alternatives those which bring us back into our actual experience what is at stake here is a way to register life in its fullness which also of course means life's emptiness and its darkness her work implies we can only register the imprint of suffering on the cloth of memory through a witness's emotional intelligence one which resists synaptic overview and final judgment but rather to use an image from her poem Vierge grande operates like a camera obscura during a solar eclipse for emotional intelligence is activated when we enter the realm of the unspeakable through glass and shadows and the light shining along the passages of your skull thus her poetry is a remarkable and salutary crawl cold I think two poets to politicians to us all who are citizens here to practice in sight for her always also involves the true discipline of empathy Nicola non-sport poetry tunes into the redemptive promise hidden in history the meaning of any deep-rooted narrative of delimited states of being is capable of being trans formed for all such stories operate like the water weeds in her poem sin berry maudlin preaching at Versailles they have undersides and new sites which though they may for now like collapsed like hair still at the turn of the tide and waiting for the right time they will flip all together there are thousands of sepia feet under static female figure in particular trapped she is and has been so often in this culture and stereotype and misrepresentation and a sense of powerlessness and a figure is brought to life she brings the entire culture to life with her she affirms both men's and women's utopian hunger for something for a life that is far far more complete and at that moment a green leaf of language comes twisting out of her mouth and out potentially of ours by Lainie Quinlan oz poetry in our contemporary tradition of poetry here I think Harold's that spring [Applause] thank you very much you can see Anna that's very generous and penetrating at least as opposed to some of the things I was trying to do whether successfully or not is another question I can't start a poetry reading on this evening without paying some reference to my friend Philip Casey who died this week who will be cremated tomorrow I'm going to start by reading a poem which is about it's about suffering it's about the it wasn't written about him but it seems to me to be the only poem of mine that might say something about a person who was able to carry the sometimes very traumatic sufferings of a long life of illness amputation and limitation with such Grace and such talent so I read this point which is called stab at matter I'm not sure Philip would approve of it because he didn't prove a religion but I read it anyway for him it was written on an occasion of it was actually commemorating a small massacre in Italy of some workers who were protesting against they wanted to be allowed to keep half of the produce of their holdings but the and they went up with sticks to demand this of the bosses but the bosses had got the police and guns with them and every year a concert is held in memory of the people who were killed on that occasion and the first one that I went to was a performance of Peggle AZ's stab at matter which of course is a terrifying poem and an extraordinarily beautiful and cheerful piece of music and that's what I was trying to comment on in this poem at last the page is peeled away the last page like a covering from a wound and the transparent sheet beneath is another page on which is written you have no enemy just look it is damaged itself and what lights up the scarred flesh to the view of the flinching eye of the one who saw it all and let us know in words we can't read rightly until such teachers as you can only find out by pushing forward in the crowd until your body is pressed flat against the glass behind the glass is the shadow of suffering and achievers because it feels your touch it's alive but others are pressing behind and you must move along and when you look back to the house of mourning the shutters inside shutters have closed down folded each one with a day's date when the calendar was in its force they all fitted together as the leaves fit the tree of atrocities and even now you can still hear the elation of the strings their long hopping as the alto fills her lungs to leadoff stabat mater I thought I would start by reading poems some of which are recent about nuns this has been something of an obsession of mine all my life but I never until quite recently thought about writing a sequence of poems on that subject but something happened about four years ago I saw a newspaper article to say that which said that the convent in Cork which was originally founded as a philanthropic enterprise by nano Nagel in the 18th century that it was going to be redeveloped as a culture which is which has happened and I suddenly realized that I had to see the place before that happened before it was torn down and stopped being even at the ruin of a convent and having seen it I started writing a number of poems which were trying to capture some of the tensions some of the historical problems and some of the realities of the lives of religious women the first one that I wrote her look quite a long time ago is called a shame Allah no Dom which means I have a pain in our teeth and it was written about my aunt who was she was the youngest of a family which contained three months and three um spinster sisters who were more pious than any nuns and she told me that when she first went to France because she joined a French Order she was learning French and at the same time learning convent speak which said that you couldn't say mine about anything so you've said our shoe our stocking and when she went to the dentist she said chamalla no doll and he thought she was mad she was the one of the of the the answers that I was closest to and after she returned to Ireland we would speak in French because she didn't want to lose the language I'll translate a couple of French phrases as I go Jai mal a new doll in memory of Anna Cullinan sister Mary Anthony the Holy Father gave her leave to return to her father's house at 78 years of age when young in the Franciscan House at Calais she complained to the dentist I have a pain in our teeth her body dissolving out of her first mother her five sisters aching at home her brother listened to news five times in a morn on radio Erin in Cork as the Germans entered Calais her name lay under the surface he could not see her working all day with the sisters stripping the hospital loading the sick on Lawry's while reverend mother walked the wards and nourished them with jugs of wine to hold their strength jettison what hay-zu means meaning I was Hospice it was done they lifted the old sisters onto the pink cart and the young walked out on the road to devil the wine still buzzing and the planes over their heads and the last two phrases Gemara LEP Sallie Potter has seen I'll be eating dandelions by the roots vulgar French expression meaning I'll be pushing up daisies I'll be dead and in Malad Aswany una mirada she went home to look after her sister Nora and she wrote to me one sick person looking after another Jamar Lily peace Ally Pally Racine a year before she died she lost her French accent going home in her habit to care for her sister Nora in Malad a swan yay in Malad they handed her back her body its voices and its death this one is about nano Nagel she is particularly interesting for many reasons one of which is she didn't really want to be a nun but she was organizing Catholic schools for schools for Catholic children mostly teaching they're just teaching them to read and she was this was illegal of course but she was also trying to do it as a lay woman and the church did not really approve of that so towards the end of her life she was really corralled into founding a religious order she had tried to import some nuns to help with the work but that didn't work very well because they were enclosed two nuns they couldn't go out and she won't she was out walking the streets of Cork going from one of her schools to another because she founded quite a number of schools and she so she had to assemble a second group of people who were allowed to go out to find people that were in need of them what their real triumph however was after her death she didn't want to be buried in the nuns graveyard but they put her in there anyway they actually broke through the wall and put her inside because then they decided to build a stone tomb for her outside the nuns graveyard and this was really because they were hoping but she would be canonized for which she would have to work a miracle and her the tomb is there her coffin is in it and there's a little latch that you can lift to touch the coffin and it is in fact place that's visited by people and the last time I went back there she had been moved again after I'd written this poem she wrote to one of her supporters complaining about the attempt to make women religious always have them all was enclosed in their conference she wrote perfect enclosure is not possible in Ireland and I should I own that I would I would not be glad to see it introduced so this poem is called an imperfect enclosure she was out in all weathers she was tired someone gave her a chair in a shop rested and then away in the street on the move the house she built first giving on the street could she close up doors and windows on that side it will be noticed as a convent she asked to be buried in the common cemetery they broke through the wall of the nuns graveyard and slipped her coffin inside but she would not stay so they built her a stone tomb nearer to Cove Lane and opened a latch at one end so hands can touch the coffin this this one is about it's an imaginary scene but it is of course the fact that the nuns were women who were often sent a long way from their families my aunt's two of my aunts never went home for 20 years and when they were were actually allowed to come back to Ireland to see their families they weren't allowed to stay in the family home so that's just some extent the background for this imaginary scene it's called sister marina was there no drama in their lives once it was almost passion tide and in Lent of course no letters arrived people knew better than to write so when a letter landed postmarked Lancaster for sister marina Reverend Mother opened and read it and went to find her just leaving an empty classroom she closed the door and handed over the letter Reverend Mother was by at least two years the younger know for the first time in her life she saw a face dragged backwards dragged down and how pain and fear come first and only about two seconds later the beginning of thought weighing down on the heart she sold the brother's wife the brother grim-faced as ever the sick child as they printed on the other woman's mind as plainly as if a light had flickered and lit them up in a screened picture nothing after that so clearly displayed how the body is all summed up in a face in a floor how knowledge travels all the way down through a body and burns into the floor that was drama she thinks at hopes for no more one Katrina referred to it's called espera I obviously couldn't write about nuns without writing of the various scandals which have attached to some enterprises of theirs they ran a mother and baby home in Cork which was a byword for bad management and heartlessness that was when I was growing up and you would hear a girl actually saying at the age of 14 or 15 I do best borough for him what on earth were they thinking of later I met actually after I'd written this poem I met someone who had had a baby and best for maybe 20 years ago I've had nothing but good to speak of her treatment there so things can and do change however when I wrote this poem I was talking to somebody who was an oral historian and she was gathering accounts of people in a poor part of Cork who had had some experience of best borough and it struck me that I had never seen the place so I got in my car and drove down it was a big house um quite near the river in Blackrock and I went down and just stood at the gates and looked in this is what I inherit it was never at my own life but a houses name I heard and others heard as warning of what might happen a girl daring and caught by ill luck a fragment of desolate fact a hammer note of fear but I never saw the place now that I stand at the gate and that time is so long gone it is their absence that rains that stabs right into the seams of my big coat settling on my shoulder and pointed knee crowding a short-day the white barred gate is closed a white fence tracks out of sight where the Avenue goes rain vales distance dimming all sound and a half drawn lace of mist hides elements of the gnome gaybies and high blind windows the story has moved away the rain darns into the grass blown over the tidal lock past the isolated roof and the tall trees in the park it gusts off to South and West earth his secret as ever the blood that was sown here flowered and all the seas blew away the last poem I'm going to read about nuns you may be relieved to hear is one I wrote a few years ago before I started on the banana nega's idea it's called the sister actually the person in this poem is is not a nun she is the sister of various nuns and when she has nowhere else to go she has to go to the convent but it's about somebody who is very well aware of convent culture the sister how on earth did she manage that journey on her own when she was a young woman they had plenty to keep them busy they were small they felt queasy they gripped a pillar in the shade and held on and as for leaving home still the trains have never changed they Thunder up the valleys built for strapping fellows slinging their big bundles easily onto high shelves real men she turned up at the station small her clothes once elegant old black past the train window slid the suburbs a fast river she saw a white-haired man waist-deep ducking under and rising again a cormorant a lump of a lad handed her bag down to her lopsided she walked as far as the convent door they greeted her with a leathery kiss they told her where to find her bed and the hour of dinner they knew the silent meal would be no surprise no more than the hard bread tougher at every slice nor the dead silence of night until the first train troubled the valley she would know lying there others were sitting up working in pairs to finish the stitching tacking the last of the lace but the cold woke her and a subtle mist as fine as goals hung on the glass in the freezing dome she dragged a web just as light across her skin veiling herself for good and she slept on to me that poem is particularly a particularly fond of us partly because all my life I wanted to write poems about trains I mean that one I managed to get a nun onto a train all right I suppose a semi nun I thought it reads another train poem then this one is called the binding and it's about the sort of thing that happens when you're travelling by train people sometimes will get up and look out a window in a particular way because they're used to this journey and there are particular landmarks that they're aware of on the way so this one is it's a shortish poem it's called the binding when the train stops at the station he stands up moves to the corridor window looks out and up at a stone house quite close to the line with a stumbling ruin behind it how it intrigues of you suggesting it belongs here and yet who something strange when I asked he says yes I lived there once I admire the plain reticent outside yes and do people live there now oh yes he says they have to stay they have the bindery and the herd all that is still going on and as long as they stay there nothing will change you can see the big press for flattening the books in the shed or at least I can because I know it is there no I was going to read a poem which I wrote nine years ago it's full it's a poem full of nines I wrote it actually for my son's wedding and it was smuggled into this book it's not even in the contents list I have to remind myself where it is at the very last minute because I wrote it with no intention of ever allowing it to be published but various people lent on me and it made its way into this book and it has now acquired an even more dubious distinction because it's a poem that is people read from who are studying for their Leaving Cert so I have been asked to ask to read a couple of the poems that are included in that so I will read two and I'll read this first one I've read this one first - Neal woods and zhenya Ostrovsky I married in Dublin on the 9th of September 2009 when you look out across the fields and you both see the same star pitching its tent on the point of the steeple that is the time to set out on your journey with half a loaf and your mother's blessing leave behind the places that you knew all that you leave behind you will find once more you will find it in the stories the sleeping beauty in her high tower with her talking cat asleep solid beside her feet you will see her again when the cat wakes up he must speak in Irish and Russian and every night he will tell you a different tale about the Firebird that stole the golden apples gone every morning out of the Emperor's garden and about the King of Ireland son and the enchanters daughter the story the cat does not know is the Book of Ruth and I have no time now to tell you how she fared when she went out at night and she was afraid in the beginning of the barley harvest or how she trusted two strangers and stood by her word you will have to trust me she lived happily ever after well that one was written rather quickly because the wedding has fixed was fixed and it had to be read at that I thought I would read another poem from that bunch which took me a very long time to write and in fact looking back at it now I can see that there are things that didn't get into it then it's it's one called the bend in the road and it was written I think about 18 years ago and it was it was looking back to something rather trivial that happened 12 years earlier the bend in the road this is the place where the child felt sick in the car and they pulled over and waited in the shadow of a house a tall tree like a cat's tail waited - they opened the windows and breathed easily while nothing moved then he was better over 12 years it has become the place where you were sick one day on the way to the lake you are taller now than us the tree is taller the house is quite covered in with green creeper and the bend in the road is a silent as ever it was on that day piled high wrapped lightly like the one cumulus cloud in a perfect sky softly packed like the air is all that went on in those years the absences the faces never long absent from thought the bodies alive then and the airy space they took up when we saw them wrapped and sealed by sickness guessing the piled weight of sleep we knew they could not carry for long this is the place of their presence in the tree in the air I read a poem called the witch in the Wardrobe which and that the title is makes it clear I think that it starts from at the great moment in CS Lewis's The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and the little girl is gets into the Wardrobe to hide among fur coats and she loves the feeling of the fur on her skin and then she goes further and further in and then she suddenly discovers she's in a totally other place the real story starts from there and so she opens the plank door where the dry palm branches had old was perched balancing lightly pegged over the architrave she swam at once inside affluent pantry a Grange of luxury the silk scarves came flying at her face like a car wash then brushed her cheeks and shoulders kuru lead on the fur slid over her skin oiled and ready and a cashmere sleeve whispered probing her ear we were here all along like an engine idling warm gentle and alert what will you do now but when she closed her eyes to feel it closer they're swatch of sublime purples intensely swooping and spinning dive past her cooing like pigeons their prickling move inside her stretched eyelids the bridge was gone and beyond it she could no longer see her body its flesh without stain its innocent skin and I read for him about which is actually like the non poems is about cork it's about the polio epidemic of 1956 when all of a sudden children like us who were constantly being told to put down that book go out and play with somebody all of a sudden it was much more important to stay inside stay out of contact with other children and seemed perfectly all right to read books all day long that was our experience but my father however could never really see a child without wanting to give it a job so one day he sent me out to deliver some letters and the deal was that I could deliver the letters and then just cycle around without speaking to anybody and so that was the moment of liberation the polio epidemic no hurry at all in house our garden the children were kept from the danger the parents suddenly had more time to watch them to keep them amused to see they had plenty to read the city lay empty infected there was no more ice cream the baths were closed all summer one day my father allowed me beyond the gate with a message to pass through a slit in a blank wall I promised I would just cycle for two hours not stop our talk and I roamed the long roads clear through city and suburbs past new churches past ridges of houses where strange children were kept indoors too I sliced through miles of air free as a plague angel descending on places the buses went Commons Road Friars walk I'm going to read another more recent poem which is about my grandparents my grandparents were married on Easter Sunday 1916 they then proceeded to the Imperial Hotel in O'Connell Street which was over Cleary's and they had been instructed that there would be something to watch and sure enough they were they did see something my grandmother had a very vivid account which is now in print but I remember her telling us of what that was like especially because it was the last time she saw her brother who came out of the GPO and then went back in again but it occurred to me when we were looking at that their anniversary to wonder how did he feel sitting in the room with all this going on he too was interested in politics but who and he was also by profession a chemist and ended up as a professor of chemistry in the University College Galway and his great scientific interest was in the chemistry of seaweed which he hoped would be the beginning of a new industry and the West so I think you know she was thinking about politics and he was thinking about seaweed seaweed for Thomas Dylan and Geraldine Plunkett married on the 23rd of April of 1916 everything in the room got in her way the table mirror catching the smoke and the edges of the smashed window panes our angle downward on the scene gave her a view of hats and scattered stones she saw her brother come out to help with the barricades the wrecked tram blocking off Earl's Street then back inside and for the man in the room obscured by her shadow against the window the darkening was a storm shifting his life he wondered where were they now and would this perch above the scene blow apart soon and he imagined the weeds that think their filaments between rocks to nourish a life in water until all of a sudden they're sheared away to sea and out at sea the gunboat was bucking and plunging throwing up spray the weeds are slapped back again on sharp rocks beside beaches they are sucked bare by the storm after this one their whole fast plucked away he was thinking would they find a place and lose it blown away again and find another on the western coast as the seaweed is landed a darkness in the dark water I'm going to end and I think yes with some new poems these are a bit bookish that's what allowed the first one I wrote a poem about Mariah Edgeworth a few years ago and her work in the Irish Famine fund raising and delivering good food as a relief and that it occurred to me that I really could write another one about her this is taken from a novel of hers our Ormond the passage that she's that she that I'm taking it from was possibly actually written by her father it's a rather adventurous account of a jailbreak Richard Lovell Edgeworth is always described as a terrible horrible moral father but he seems in fact to have had great interest in adventure and romance and he describes how an innocent man who finds himself in Kilmainham jail about to be transported just happens with a long to a man who's a famous jailbreaker who has a best going on with the judge that if he can get out of Kilmainham he'll be given a free pardon if he can get out of Kilmainham and tell them how he did it he guess he'll be given a free pardon so how does he feel about this innocent who did some of the work and broke out with him it's a short poem Kilmainham tell me he said how you managed to break out of my Jail so that I can build a better one that will not fail so I explained about the whistle and the gin the special shoes of so forth and I threw in the ropes made out of blankets the faults and cuffs the vitriol the cunning tailored loose cut roses the tobacco pipe and all to distract him from the innocent who passed down the high wall at my side who is wandering the now transparent as the ocean as the glassy flow of shallow tides over stones will he ever get home at all this one is called the bookshelves think it tell us what it's about these are our cliffs where we hang and grope and slide why should there ever be a path upwards among such random stacks somebody shows them size by size but still they signal throbbing on arcane themes lightning blazes like a faraway headlight on the firmly elsewhere most times it's the finger tucked in the big dictionary that leads on as if under submerged loose wire along damp paving to the ancient reservoir to tell us that the jumping flashes on the rock face were a code for a name we could never have otherwise known this one also has bookshelves in it but well not really books it's called monsters now that there's nothing I don't understand why don't they come to me with their information they come in my dreams with their highlighting pens they tell me the Roman numerals on the shelf and shelf end panels in the Cathedral library have all been rebuilded someone has worked with a gate and crows feathers to raise gold flourishes and leaf script capitals show us they ask the book there opens like a curtain and I tell them about the day I met Ovid in the street and he passed me without a greeting he had just thought of the words that made the shrouds and tackling swell with small buds then loop stems then five-pointed leaves of Ivy catching clutching the oars when I read it again myself I can see the oarsmen frozen at their work the sleepy drunk youngster they were planning to sell that wept when they tied his hands all of a sudden in charge his forehead ornate with grapes he is balanced on delicate sandals watching how they change their spines curved they dance in the waves each man a monster to his neighbor sorry I should have explained I suppose that it's about Ovid's metamorphoses of the wicked sailors who thought they could make a slave out of the guard Bacchus and who are transformed into dolphins the last point I'm going to read is also a new one it's only a little bit longer it's called the capture it's from it's based on the story from the Narrow Gowalla which is about the Malaysians coming to Ireland if you remember the two had a Danone conceal the island in mists and the my lesions however do manage to get ashore and their poet ever again de claims a very odd poem in which he is a wave of the sea and the strength of the wave and a bull of seven battles and various other extraordinary things it seems as if the poem which survives in the Lehrer gowalla is older and may possibly be some kind of magical invocation at any rate I and indeed other holders of the office of Ireland chair of poetry have been asked to write a poem about this in response to this and I suppose the question is what did the poets see did he think he could see the whole of Ireland he didn't have an aeroplane and who does he think he was himself a bull or a wave or just a poet so a capture first helped me to make the frame with wings and a nose and a tail fin room for those thick furred beasts if they scramble up or settle out of the air and a crack to harbor seeds for a trail of leaves so when I leap away the horizon swings in the far distance the hills are floating like smoke the fuse and the valley exposed then diving the plane flashing and in every hollow under the leaves a life Huddle's listening for a note that stings music into life a song that jumps that grieves accept that I am NOT the earth but a late map of this earth its hedges attacking me down don't expect me to race again the yearly bands of children at school under the hedges are memorizing their alphabets inflections and the distances grow longer with every name called on the roll I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink as there's no room left in the passages of my brain for every conversation between the slug and the leaf yes if I follow the slow air we're hit where it spreads and tracks the labouring boats across the oceans where it knocks at every door and pushes inside where it wines along roads in France beside the daughters leaving home to serve strangers the sons in foreign fields the one holding King Louie's hand on the scaffold as he prays the earth recedes can they all be crammed and keyed the Irish race through history which terms do we lack to hold that together and how can we see anything without the frame if I am a screen flickering between the four hand-painted provinces and the bricks and timber timber the roof that shelters me I should find the bits of the frame I should walk around them to see if they could be matched awry to a different plan then see if I can persuade them to limp back over the hedges and if then I'll feel the weight of the beasts as they settle again along the mich mismatched wings thank you [Applause]

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Length: 51min 12sec (3072 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018