Memory
Memory and the
process of remembering features in many Ní Chuilleanáin poems including: The Bend in the Road, On Lacking the Killer
Instinct and Kilcash.
The Bend in the Road focuses on how memory connects with specific places
and how these places can assume personal significance over time. Every time the poet passes a particular ‘bend
in the road’ she remembers her child was ‘sick one day on the way to the lake’
and how the family associated that place with that event ever since.
On Lacking the Killer Instinct demonstrates the process of memory, how
one thought can spark off a memory and another and another. A picture in the
paper sparks off the memory of the time when her father was dying in hospital
and then she thinks of her father as a young man.
Kilcash pays tribute to a heroic figure from Irish history, Lady Iveagh, and
places emphasis on the importance of remembering those who have died.
Love
To Niall Woods is a vibrant celebration of romantic love that
fervently believes in ‘happily ever after’.
In this poem Ní Chuilleanáin depicts an idealised, magical vision of
love by referencing traditional folk tales.
She advises her son and his bride to have courage as they start out on
the adventure of marriage together:
Leave
behind the places that you knew:
All
that you leave behind you will find once more.
Street deals with love in a more ambiguous way. In it a man falls in love
with the butcher’s daughter who he watches passing by in the street. It appears
to be a one sided attraction in that we do not get the butcher’s daughter’s
perspective.
The dark side of
love is hinted at when he follows her home one day and sees her bloody footmarks
on the stairs. The reader is left
guessing as to the outcome.
History
On Lacking the Killer Instinct deals with a violent period in Irish
history which Ní Chuilleanáin’s father took active part – The War of
Independence. She describes how he was
chased by ‘a lorry-load of soldiers’, the Black and Tans, a notoriously
ruthless force, on one particular occasion and thankful evaded capture. She
criticises the need for such violence saying he ‘like the hare should never
have been coursed.’
Kilcash details the suffering endured by the Irish people as a consequence of
colonialism. The suppression of religion
and theft of natural resources: ‘What will we do now for timber?’ left the
people poor and struggling for identity. Leaders were exiled leaving the people
unprotected. The poet depicts the scene in apocalyptic terms:
Mist hangs low on the
branches
No sunlight can sweep aside,
Darkness falls among daylight
And the streams are all run
dry;
Lucina Shynning in the Silence of the Night references Cromwell who was responsible
for a violent and chaotic invasion of Ireland in 1649. She describes the dark
moments of history as: ‘the waves of darkness’ behind her.
Death
Death and Engines focuses on the inevitability of death in all our lives. Each of us will
encounter a moment when we are ‘Cornered’ by death and will have no way to
escape. Some might survive encounters
with death and feel ‘relief’ but they cannot escape it forever. A time will come when it will be ‘too late to
stop’.
Kilcash is an elegy for Lady Iveagh who contributed so much to her local
community when alive and whose absence was strongly lamented.
