Forms of Exile: Reading Cyphers‪.‬

Secrecy, hiddenness, obliquity, and other correlatives of the obscure have been among the most commented-upon aspects of the aesthetic and ethics of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's poetry, and some of the most compelling. (1) That Cyphers, the literary magazine she co-founded with Pearse Hutchinson, Macdara Woods, and Leland Bardwell in 1975, should be so named should, then, surprise no-one. Names matter, whether they designate people, places, or indeed literary magazines. Announced by a title that makes a virtue of opacity, seeming to float free of any anchoring in a specific place or origin while clearly speaking to an Irish audience, Cyphers articulates some complex relations between literature, place, nation, language, and identity. If Poetry Ireland Review situates the nation at the heart of its project, and, both titularly and, quite often, editorially, declares itself the 'official' voice of poetry in Ireland, then Cyphers can be seen as having offered, for more than three decades now, an alternative gloss on the interrelations of literature and the 'home land', mapping (or recovering) an unofficial geography of the place of that home spatially and historically. (2) I. The Anatomy of a Literary Magazine: Situating Cyphers