The Girl Who Married the Reindeer - Tapa dura

"Although Eilean Ni Chuilleanain has done as much as anyone to map out new territories for Irish poetry, her poems...are never happier than when sequestering themselves or seeking out some comfortable hidey-hole away from public view. ...but to the mysteries of her work can be added what is by now an open secret: that she has written some of the most skillfully crafted and rewarding poetry of the past thirty years, a verdict only confirmed by The Girl Who Married the Reindeer."

In The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin radically redesigns the language and form of poetic narrative. In poems about journeys to worlds real and metaphorical, she reveals deft crossings of borders, linguistic boundaries, and cultures, from the sepulchre of Lazarus to the web of a spider ?who makes her own new centre every day.” Beginning mid-journey, the poems often arrive at mysterious destinations. Throughout the volume, Ní Chuilleanáin displaces the finger posts of narrative which is redefined of a traveler’s productive strayings and even self-exiles: ?I follow the road that follows the lie of the land.”