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Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin visits Stratford during Arts Week

Arts Week 2015: poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Photo: R. Baker
NEWS / 23 November 2015

The poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin visited Stratford College during Arts Week (16th - 20th November) at the invitation of Ms. Reynolds. Her poetry is on the Leaving Certificate English syllabus. Svetlana Cvetic, 6th Year, describes the impact of her visit on the senior students.

Last Wednesday, 18th November, during Arts Week we were visited by popular Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Ní Chuilleanáin was born in 1942, she studied at UCC and Oxford and before she retired in 2011, she taught Literature at Trinity. She's written many collections of poetry and they're known for being very fantastical, very metaphorical and very beautiful.

The reason we invited her was because Ní Chuilleanáin is on the Leaving Cert syllabus for English. She might come up in our exam in June, so we made the most of the opportunity to ask her about her work. I think that the 4th and 5th years, along with us the 6th, will agree that it was an enlightening talk which added a whole other dimension to her work.

To give you an idea of her poetry, I'm going to read one of them to you [Svetlana read it at the 6th Year Assembly]. This is something of a favourite in our class and we've spent a lot of time debating it; "What does this mean? Is this a metaphor? Is that a metaphor? What thing is she trying to tell us secretly?" We we excited when we finally got to ask her on Wednesday and it turned out we were completely wrong, there was no metaphore...

This poem is called 'Lucina Schynning in in Silence of the Nicht'...

Svetlana Cvetic (6th Year)

Arts Week 2015: poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Photo: R. Baker

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