Eileen Sheehan is from Scartaglen, in the Sliabh Luachra area of County Kerry. She lives in Killarney. She is the author of two previous collections, Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (both from Doghouse Books). She has read at festivals in Ireland and abroad including The Shanghai Literary Festival; the ACIS Conference in Davenport, Iowa, The Cork International Poetry Festival and Writers' Week Listowel. Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (editor Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry); Best Loved Poems: Favourite Poems from the South of Ireland (editor Gabriel Fitzmaurice with photographs by John Reidy/Curragh Press); The Deep Heart's Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem (editors Eugene O'Connell & Pat Boran/ Dedalus Press) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (editor Niall MacMonagle/ The Celtic Press). One of the poems from this collection is on the Leaving Certificate English Syllabus 2019 - 2022.

Books by Eileen Sheehan:

Other poems on the web by Eileen Sheehan:
Three poems
Thirteen poems
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems
Six poems
"claiming it (2006)"

Eileen Sheehan According to Wikipedia.

About The Narrow Way of Souls:

"In Eileen Sheehan's third collection, The Narrow Way of Souls, there is an ongoing investigation of the liminal spaces between speech and silence; between body and spirit; between question and answer. Often peopled by metaphorical avatars, these are poems that move through both negative and positive spaces — crossing, crossing over, and journeying; the reader is carried between the real and the surreal. Springing from conscious experience, from history and folklore, from the process of grieving and the experience of grief, these visionary poems light our mad dash along the road between life and death, and further yet."
—Frances Devlin-Glass

"Poems encoded in a rare triple helix of talent, passion and delicate attention to detail. Much has been made by critics of her word-craft: its earthy rhythms, its careful cadences, the evocative lyricality with which she explores the ancient and undying themes of love, family, domesticity, nature, death and myth. Yet her poetic compass frequently leads her beyond this well-trod ground, toward situations uncannily familiar or curiously surreal. Such moments are captured with consistently surprising metaphor in work that possesses a delightfully magnetic and multi-layered simplicity ... Poems are steeped in a defiantly secular, perhaps even pagan spirituality, an aspect of her work designed to ground, humble and make a rougher concrete of the more dialectically Christian tenets that underpin much of the Irish poetic tradition."
—Paul Casey

"She has a command of language, imagery and poetic imagination that places this collection in the forefront of what has been produced recently by contemporary Irish women poets who have, as Sheehan certainly has, learned their trade. There is nothing maudlin or sentimental here; indeed, strength and firmness of tone makes this a very muscular kind of poetry. ... This is quite memorable work."
—Fred Johnston

"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, have distinct formal characteristics but are always distinctly hers ... She is a poet of the proper kind."
—Quincy R. Lehr

"There is a clarity of spirit — a searching spirit travelling childhood and old age, a realizing spirit traversing the boundaries between heart and creative intelligence. At times it touches on the Delphic."
—Michael Curtis