King Lear
After studying Ni chuilleanains poetry I am hugely impressed yet I completely agree with the statement' .......................' It is evident that Ni Chuilleanain deals with some very intense and powerful topics in her poetry and her style of writing is not conventional. In the coutse of this essay I am going to discuss four of Ni Chuilleanains poems which I found to have a demanind subject matter and hugely formidable style.These poemas are 'Death and Engines' 'street' ttranslation' and 'the bend in the road'
The poem 'street' is a short, lyrical poem which delves into the strange nature of attraction and love and portrays love in an atypical way. In the poem we observe how a male figure 'fell in love with the butcher's daughter' after watching her journey home to 'the shambles' after her day in work. While most of us would believe that one must know a person before falling in love, in this poem that typical view is distorted as the man falls in love almost immediately. This can seem very surreal to imagine falling to be such a simple thing. In the poem. In the poem we are also given the chance to view love as a unhealty and unnerving. We grow anxious for th young girl as the man 'stared' at her and 'followed' her home. Love would usually be described as something divine however in 'street' we are introduced to the sinister and threating side that does occour in many relationshipd behind closed curtains.
Ni Chuilleanain uses a very daunting style of writing to put across her message. The title of the poem 'street' gives a mysterious aspect to the poem as it is very vague. The inital use of the word 'white' gives us the sense that the young girl is very pure and innocent however the later utilisation of the word 'red' istils a sense of danger and menace that the love has bo=rought about. The 'slanting lane' allows us to cocnclude that the girl is out of sight of people around the vacinity and this inspires fear as we don't want her left alone with this suspicious man.
Similiarly to 'street' and so many more of Ni chuilleanains poems, 'death and engines' has a exhausting subject matter. The motif of the poem is the sudenness and inivetability of death. The poem reminds us of the bitter truth that death is in fact unavoidable and something that each of us will at some point have to endure. This is a topic that many individuals find very uneasing and struggle to come to terms with. The notion that death can strike at any moment is distinctly broight home to the poet when on a flight one winter. After viewing 'te back half of a plane' which had crashed lying on the runwaythe poet begins to think about the inevitability of death. This thought seems to be 'contagious' and has occupied not only yj mond of the poet but also of the 'lonely pilot' Ni chuilleanain respects that there will be times of 'relief' and that certain things will comfort will us at times when death flashes before our eyes, however she points out that these things will at osme point 'fail' and death will be the only answer.
The style in which 'death and engines' is written proves to be quie challenging. The poem begins mid arrative which requires a lot of thought and one must try imagine the events which had occoured before. The use of the 'black' plane 'on the snow' provides a stark contrast and a sense of devestation in this dream like setting. The repetition of 'o' sounds in the second stanza generates an ueasy atmosphere and depicts the unsettled feeling of the oet. Finally, the us eof ' cold metal wings' allows us to think of the coldness of death and how it is as if death is somehow contained in inanimate objects.