Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is one of the most significant poets to emerge in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. The relationship between past and present is important in her work, not only because memory often shapes her subject matter but also because of the uncanny ways in which temporal difference is elided, creating gaps in meaning, or places where language is used in cryptic ways. These give rise to the formal challenges of her work: ‘the world she creates in a poem has an enigmatic centre’, writes Eamon Grennan, ‘one sees the facts clearly enough, but the purpose and point of these clearly realised facts aren't easy to pin down’. For Ní Chuilleanáin the overlapping territory of memory and history is often marked by silence – many of her poems are concerned with what is withheld from expression and what this means both for the individual and the community. In her work there are aspects of the private that can never become fully public: experiences or phenomena that remain resistant to observation and analysis. Her engagement with these elements creates a pattern in her work – a repeated concern with the ways in which knowledge materializes in the lives and practices of both individuals and communities. This chapter examines her poems as objects that carry the past without giving direct expression to it. In this way, Ní Chuilleanáin's oeuvre provokes us to consider how the past is mediated, and in particular how the private, unstated past relates to ideas of shared narrative.

This emphasis on privacy has important ramifications for the operation of memory in Ní Chuilleanáin's work. In particular, it draws attention to the relationship between private and shared spaces as both physical and linguistic entities. The recurrence of personal and familial memories draws attention to the question of shared narratives and their broader implications for how we might understand the past.

Psychologist Frederic Bartlett found that people recall ‘not the presented [narrative] material directly, but a judgment which they made about this material when they saw it originally’. This dynamic is applicable to some of the processes of remembering in Ní Chuilleanáin's work, where perspectives slip between a story recalled and other, more fleeting, impressions.