Dream Shine
by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
When I switch off the light
the darkness lasts only
an instant, they appear
like women in their doorways
hesitant, brandishing
their dim lamp. The shine
reflected from deep snow
edges the darkness
of a hanging gown,
singles out a surface,
a beam sliding upwards,
a gleam suspended;
a slice wriggles up
from a fountain in the courtyard,
slips into the room,
finds itself a shelf,
bobs beside it —
who would not prefer
to sleep surrounded
by these gentle intruders,
wrapped in their whispers:
Go to sleep, dream about
the mouse that used to watch you,
looking out from his door
in the dashboard, sidelong,
as soon as the engine growled
and the car moved on its road?
From The Boys of Bluehill. Reproduced with kind permission from The Gallery Press.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2015
The Boys of Bluehill
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
About Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (b. 1942, Cork) remembers ‘being flabbergasted by the finesse and symmetry of a Shakespeare sonnet’ when her mother read to her as a child. ‘People said poetry was difficult, so I said “I’ll do that”’.
She started writing poems seriously when she was fifteen: ‘It was very obscure because I was writing about things I didn’t understand. then, at 20 or so, a poem got published, and I began to realise that if people were to read it, the writing had better be clearer. I still write about things I don’t understand, like sex and death and history, but I try to find ways of making them more articulate’.
A translator and editor, as well as a poet, Ní Chuilleanáin has won many literary prizes, including the 2010 Griffin Prize. She co-founded the literary magazine Cyphers, and she has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. She is an Emeritus Fellow and Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin.
Her 2015 collection The Boys of Bluehill (The Gallery Press, 2015) was named after a traditional Irish hornpipe. She says it was clear to her from the start that it would have a musical core: it includes poems about trying to make sense of the past, her violinist sister, nuns and her first grandchild. The Guardian recently compared her work ‘with her love of dens, hiding-places, ruins and language itself as an in-between space’ to that of her compatriot Samuel Beckett. The real drama of The Boys of Bluehill, said the reviewer ‘takes place in shadowy, marginal zones.’
Her advice to new poets is: ‘Read and keep reading…and definitely never live with anyone who thinks poetry is your hobby.’
