The Sun-fish

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Sun-fish deftly displays the poet’s gift for the allegorical, verging at times on parable, yet always with a sense of lived experience and a strong acknowledgement of the everyday. From the dedicatory epithalamium to the concluding poem, Ní Chuilleanáin’s enigmatic verse exudes deep but unpretentious wisdom, often asking simple questions that demand complex answers. In poems on nature, writing, folklore, religion, love and grief, and on many homes in different places, we are taught to “see who is there / In the whirling dance” so that we may trace the line between illusion and reality and grasp the “moment thinning the curtain, / Real, like the tricks of light.” Winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize.