Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has long had a reputation for obliquity, and in approaching her work we will often find she withholds as much as she discloses. Ní Chuilleanáin’s frequent ekphrastic poems and recourse to metaphors of framing are also ways of rephrasing the central question of what a poem is, and how to approach lyric form afresh. Her focus on art works frequently transports the reader to a pre-Renaissance world, which Ní Chuilleanáin finds temperamentally conducive in her warm visions of Mediterranean Catholicism, and in the stress in her critical writings as well as her poetry on questions of embodiment and revealed truth. Music and architecture are frequent reference points, sometimes via the metaphysical poets, before Ní Chuilleanáin puts her distinctive and personal stamp on these themes. Hers is a complex art, but one whose façade of secrecy provides the necessary theatrical backdrop while Ní Chuilleanáin probes and reinvents received ideas of the woman poet in the Irish tradition.

Prosodic dissonance marks out those most difficult and most stimulating poetic works in rhythm. Poems that do dissonance, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to successive waves of avant-garde poetry over the last century, have confounded commentators and exposed certain analogical faultlines. Recourses to ‘musicality’ in poetry have long assumed that the ‘music’ of a poem must mean, in a word, euphony. Yet a musical poem, as Northrop Frye noted, would withhold rhythmic or rhymic resolve, sporting rugged, crabbed accents and lumbering polysyllables, a sequence of discords only ending with a harmony. Such analogies further do not take into account the centrality of dissonance in twentieth-century music. We therefore need new models and new ways of talking about prosodic dissonance that can take into account a fuller range of poetics. Prosody that attempts such dissonance can be found in the works of Jackson Mac Low, who greatly admired Hopkins. In a reading that follows Frye on Hopkins’s ‘inscape’ I claim that Mac Low seeks ‘outscape’, an emancipation of dissonant potential. Instress becomes outstress, a poetics of clashing exteriors; ‘pure projected detachment’, energy thrown outward and away from the poet, or starting out and finding in.