Hundred-Pocketed Time': Ni Chuilleanain's Baroque Spaces (Eilean Ni Chuilleanain‪)‬

I. The Body in Baroque Art Eilean Ni Chuilleanain recalls her childhood experience of confronting a locked door, a frequent motif in her poetry, and, in this case, 'straining to catch a glimpse of a grey buttock and a muscular thigh through the window' of a shed on the campus of University College Cork. When even some plaster casts of classic nudes are sequestered as possible 'occasions for sin', the poet's erotic-aesthetic awakenings must face postponement, perhaps to occur in another country under another aesthetic dispensation. Ni Chuilleanain recalls at age twenty, in Berlin's Dahlem Gemaldegalerie, passing from three rooms of autumnal Rembrandts into the dazzle of Correggio's Leda and the Swan, 'full of blue and white, narrative space, and perversity'. She writes: