Like a Shadow in Water': Phenomenology and Poetics in the Work of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain‪.‬

In The Poetics of Space, the French phenomenologist, Gaston Bachelard, elaborates on the poetics of existential space and calls for a spatial concept of the subject that brings together self and world, being and fantasy. Such a space signifies a phenomenology that is expressed in poetic language as a dialectics between 'within and without', and stresses the role of poetry as a means of discovering our relation to the world. (1) Clear parallels can be drawn between Bachelard's poetics of space and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's use of the spatial metaphor in her poetry, where space is explored as an expression of one's experience of the world and one's place in that world. This idea of space as a metaphor for the linking together of self and word, as expressed in poetic language, is what interests me here in Ni Chuilleanain's poetry. For instance, in her poem 'The Promise' the notion of space as a unifying force is expressed in the metaphors of a continuous river and a road linking experiences together: This linking together of experience by means of space is expressed also by the speaker in 'The Last Glimpse of Erin', where surfaces flow together, uniting the speaker in a web of interconnectedness: 'We face the air, all surfaces become / Sheer, one long line is growing / Like a spider's navel cord'. (3)