Eileen Sheehan is, at the moment, perhaps one of Ireland’s most underrated poets.* Sure, she’s appeared in all the right journals, has a lovely blurb on the back of her book from Nuala Ni Dhomhnail (a leading Irish-language poet, for those who don’t know), and was recently a reader at The National American Conference For Irish Studies in Iowa in April 2008. She is well known and respected among her peers, and is a good performer of her work. But unfortunately, hers are not the books that tend to be reviewed in Ireland’s little magazines (those that even do reviews), much less in the Irish Times. This is a shame, because Sheehan’s publisher, the Tralee-based Doghouse, has published a list that, though uneven (a few of the offerings straying into the frankly godawful), includes fine poets such as John W. Sexton and Liam Aungier, as well as newcomers worth watching like Barbara Smith (the author of a fine first collection, Kairos) and Catherine Ann Cullen (A Bone in My Throat, 2007).
Sheehan’s second collection (Down the Sunlit Hall, Doghouse 2008) confirms her skill as a poet and her capacity to write seductively. These are the sort of poems that draw you from the enticements of other books clamouring for your attention. Sheehan can be funny, as in the opening of “upended to someplace”:
Barefoot by lamplight, by curtained midnight. Slipped
in a puddle of dog piss. Landed straight
into the arse-end of tomorrow. Can happen
like that, revelations, things of that nature.
Or solemn, as in the close to “Threat of Rain”:
we step back
at the sound of earth on wood
back to notice the living
back into our own
diminished lives.
Or, in poems like “Needing to Be”, Sheehan is both at once. She is not a poet of a single mood, tempo, or, indeed, song. Her poems, at times whimsical, but rooted in particulars of time, place, and personality, are always distinctly hers. She has a great capacity to skirt several emotions, or perhaps levels of consciousness, at once. Her narrators can start off in childlike naïveté, and then switch to adulthood’s disillusionment, without losing the sense of wonder that generally lurks just below the surface of Sheehan’s accounts of the seemingly day-to-day. And it is this sense of seeming slightly startled, of a subtle unfamiliarity within the familiar, that gives Sheehan her claim to significance.
One wishes that one could say the same about the bulk of contemporary Irish poetry. There is a lot of talent, but Irish authors can too often, on the basis of a contest win or the recommendation of someone a bit higher on the literary food chain, get collections too quickly, where a handful of good poems are padded out with filler and workshop exercises. Much of this work suffers from many of the same weaknesses of much contemporary American poetry — the rather bland anecdote rendered in lineated prose and, thankfully, generally over rather quickly. But Sheehan’s free verse still feels like verse rather than a dullish paragraph hacked up with a berserk “Enter” key, and every poem feels like it needs to be there. One does not have to parse out the prosodic decisions to “get it” — though one can. She is a poet of the proper kind.
*Personal disclosure — I know the author and think she’s pretty nifty.
