An Eavan Boland Source Packet

An
Eavan Boland
Source Packet
IB A1 ENGLISH
IT’S A WOMAN’S WORLD
BIOGRAPHY
Eavan Aisling Boland was born September 24, 1944, in
Dublin, Ireland. The daughter of Frederick H. Boland, a
diplomat, and Frances Kelly, a painter, Boland grew up
in Dublin, London, and New York City. In 1966, she
graduated with honors from Trinity College in Dublin,
where she later was a lecturer in the English
department. From the late 1960s through the late
1980s, Boland worked as a cultural journalist, writing
reviews for the arts section of the Irish Times and other
publications. Since the 1980s, Boland has taught at
several colleges in the United States and Ireland,
including Bowdoin College, Washington University,
University College Dublin, and Stanford University. Since
1995, she has been the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury
Knapp Professor in the Humanities and director of the
creative writing program at Stanford.
In 1967, Boland published a collection of poems titled New Territory. Boland has since
published ten poetry collections, including The War Horse (1975), Night Feed (1982),
Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980 – 1990 (1990), An Origin Like Water: Collected
Poems 1967 – 1987 (1996), and Against Love Poetry: Poems (2001). "It's a Woman's World
appears in Night Feed.
Boland has also published volumes of prose, including Object Lessons: The Life of the
Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995) and A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National
Tradition (1989). She coauthored a biography of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, W. B.
Yeats and His World (1998), and has edited several anthologies, including, with the
American poet Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
(2000).
Boland has received many distinguished awards, such as the 1994 Lannan Award for poetry,
Poetry magazine's 2002 Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, and the Yale Review's Smartt Family
Prize for Against Love Poetry.
An Irish Childhood in England: 1951
The bickering of vowels on the buses,
!the clicking thumbs and the big hips of
!the navy-skirted ticket collectors with
!their crooked seams brought it home to me:
!Exile. Ration-book pudding.
!Bowls of dripping and the fixed smile
! of the school pianist playing "Iolanthe,"
!"Land of Hope and Glory" !and "John Peel."
I didn't know what to hold, to keep.!
At night, filled with some malaise
!of love for what I'd never known I had,
I fell asleep and let the moment pass
The passing moment has become a night
of clipped shadows, freshly painted houses,
the garden eddying in the dark and heat,
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my children half-awake, half-asleep.
Airless, humid dark. Leaf-noise.
The stirrings of a garden before rain.
A hint of the storm behind the risen moon.
A hint of storm behind the risen moon.!
We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to?-in a strange city, in another country,
on nights in a north-facing bedroom,
!waiting for the sleep that never did
restore me as I'd hoped to what I'd lostlet the world I knew become the space
!between the words that I had by heart
!and all the other speech that always was !
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one: !
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
!overdressed and sick on the plane
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you'd lost and how: !
was the teacher in the London convent who
when I produced 'I amn't' in the classroom
!turned and said- 'You're not in Ireland now.'
“
In this poem Boland describes her struggle to hold on to what she never really knew
about Ireland. She writes, “I didn’t know what to hold, to keep./At night, filled
with some malaise of love for what I’d never known I had,/I fell asleep and let the
moment pass” (Boland, 1987, 10-13). Boland doesn’t know what to hold on to and so she
allows her mind to think of other things, current things, to fill that moment. She writes,
“We are what we have chosen” but then she wonders if she really chose to “let the world I
knew become the space/between the words that I had by heart/and all the other speech
that always was/becoming the language of the country that/I came to in nineteen-fiftyone” (Boland, 1987, 21,26-30). She doesn’t believe that she chose to have her whole world
changed by all the words and lessons she was taught in England. She doesn’t know if she
can believe that she had a choice in changing who she was in order to survive in England.
We see this more clearly when she explains that “all of England to an Irish child/was
nothing more that what you’d lost and how/…when I produced “I amn’t” in the
classroom/[the teacher] turned and said – “you’re not in Ireland now”” (Boland, 1987, 3334,36-37). Boland questions if she really had a choice as to who she was going to be when
she came to England as a little girl.
”
Islan ds Apart: A Notebook
by Eavan Boland
I live in Dublin and California. In both places, on both sets of shelves, I keep the same book. It
was published in Ireland in the twenties. Like anyone with a similar passion, I’ve given up
asking people if they have read it — or asking those who have read it if they remember it.
The book is called The Hidden Ireland. It’s about a townland in Ireland called Sliabh Luachra,
a mountainy, rushy district on the Cork-Kerry border. In the eighteenth century it was the
home of native-speaking Irish poets such as Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Eoghan Rua Ó
Súilleabháin. The book tracks their struggle in a dark time.
The author was Daniel Corkery. He was a fierce, contrarian writer from Cork, born in 1878.
He regarded Yeats and Lady Gregory with an equal and angry suspicion. He rejected the Irish
Revival. “Though we may think of this literature as a homogeneous thing,” he wrote
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plaintively, “we cannot think of it as an
indigenous thing.”
The Hidden Ireland is an unrepentant
elegy for that “indigenous thing.” He
mourns and celebrates those hardpressed, Irish-speaking poets of the
eighteenth century. He looks back to
their dying language, to the lost Gaelic
order and writes with a scalding
bitterness about that loss.
When I was a teenager, trying to hear
other voices, I heard his. Now, when I
go back to Ireland and see the new
prosperity there, I still hear that voice.
Maybe no passage when I was young —
not Synge, not Joyce, not even Yeats — moved me more than his furious insistence that a
group of ruined Irish poets could remain an inspiration:
In reading those poets, then, we are to keep in mind, first, that the nature of the poetry
depends on the district in which it was written — if in Munster, it is literary in its nature; if in
Ulster or Connacht, it has the simple directness of folk-song. Then we must also remember
that the poets were simple men, living as peasants in rural surroundings; some of them,
probably, never saw a city; not only this, but they were all poor men, very often sore-troubled
where and how to find shelter, clothing, food, at the end of a day’s tramping. Their native
culture is ancient, harking back to pre-Renaissance standards; but there is no inflow of books
from outside to impregnate it with new thoughts. Their language is dying: around them is the
drip, drip of callous decay: famine overtakes famine, or the people are cleared from the land
to make room for bullocks. The rocks in hidden mountain clefts are the only altars left to
them; and teaching is a felony.
Not to excuse, but to explain them, are these facts mentioned; for their poetry, though
doubtless the poorest chapter in the book of Irish literature, is in itself no poor thing that
needs excuse: it is, contrariwise, a rich thing, a marvelous inheritance, bright with music,
flushed with color, deep with human feeling. To see it against the dark world that threw it up
is to be astonished, if not dazzled.
*
*
*
Who exactly is a poet? How do we recognize one, even when circumstances seem to deny the
possibility of such an existence? Once I thought Corkery had the answer. Now it looks far less
simple. When I try to think these days about what Corkery meant, I keep colliding into other
definitions. Nothing about the poet’s identity or survival looks as clear as it did when I first
read The Hidden Ireland. And of course nothing looks as singular. It seems to me now there
are many definitions of the poet — some of them contradictory to each other.
Maybe it’s that I live in two places, or went to school in different countries, or come from an
island where two languages produced two very different versions of the poet — whatever it is,
these ideas of the poet’s identity and existence keep coming to me, keep asking for a clearer
definition. And if I can’t exactly provide it, I still keep thinking I should try.
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Boland in Conversation
Below is an interview conducted by Elizabeth Schmidt in 2001, the editor of the literary
magazine, Open City, and writer at The New Yorker magazine. Accordingly, Boland's views
on feminism, her works, and life are portrayed.
Elizabeth Schmidt: As a poet who has been involved in both Irish and American poetry
communities, do you see many differences between the two? Similarities? In which world do
you feel most at home?
Eavan Boland: Of course they're alike in some ways. But I notice the differences more than
the similarities. They're separated, as poetry worlds, by their history and by their heritage.
The Irish poetry world when I first knew it still had nineteenth century shadows on it. It was
a small, unified, intense community, whose references to the past were a common
language. The American poetry world is so much larger, more diverse. The common
references are much less obvious, at least to an Irish poet. In terms of feeling at home, of
course I feel at home in Ireland because I am at home there. But I sought out American
poetry because of that powerful, inclusive diversity. I always remember I'm an Irish poet
there, but at the same time some part of my sense of poetry feels very confirmed by the
American achievement.
Schmidt: Is it possible to talk generally about how contemporary American poetry differs
from contemporary Irish poetry? And more particularly, do you see a difference in how
poets in each country are writing lyric poetry? By "Lyric" I have in mind Charles Simic's
recent statement that only the finest lyric poems communicate "the experience of the
naked moment," that they are the only poems that leave "a lasting record of our naked
humanity."
Boland: The contemporary differences go back, as I've just remarked, to some of the
historic ones. It's very hard, even for a contemporary lyric poetry, to escape history. And
the differences there are really striking. Irish poetry has a bardic history. The Irish bards
lay down in darkness to compose. They wrote poems to their patrons that ranged from
christening odes to the darkest invective. They were poets who were shaped by an oral
culture and you only have to read a book like Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland to know
that long after they were abandoned by history at the end of the eighteenth century, long
after their language was destroyed, they were remembered and quoted in Ireland. The
drama of all that still backlights Irish poetry--the painful memory of a poetry whose archive
was its audience. There is a sort of communal aspect to the identity of the Irish poet even
now that has an effect on the contemporary Irish lyric. American poetry, on the other
hand, seems to me very tied in with the rise of literacy. As soon as it existed it was read.
Of course there are other poetries--I'm thinking of the Harlem Renaissance in particular-where I think the background is more similar to the Irish one, and more oral. But the
American poet who traces a descent from Whitman or Dickinson--I know this is a simplified
diagram--doesn't have the intense oral, communal past to contend with. They have the
exciting sense of a new language, not an old or mortgaged one. So I think, in comments
made by Irish and American poets, you have this contrast where the American poet can feel
isolated, and the Irish poet oppressed by the communal shadows that fall across the poem.
It cuts both ways. Irish poetry draws strength from the bardic past. American poetry seems
to me to have benefited, obliquely and maybe painfully, from that felt isolation of the
American poet, because it has resulted in that tradition of experiment I admire so much.
Irish poetry couldn't have produced a Wallace Stevens. On the other hand, those communal
tensions worked well to goad William Yeats into poetry, and kept goading him to the very
end of his life. So back to your question on the contemporary lyric. The Irish lyric poem is
often strong, eloquent, accessible. It's the lingua franca of Irish poetry. But it's not
experimental enough, in my view. Its ties to the old communal obligations of Irish poetry
don't help it. The American lyric poem, on the other hand, has been experimental from the
start. Look at Dickinson. She was instantly subversive in her lyric.
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Schmidt: Having taught in Ireland and America, do you find differences in the way
emerging poets write in each country? In how they work at becoming poets?
Boland: Travel and communication have definitely changed things. The gulf between poetic
communities like Ireland and America is not as wide as it once was. I think there are real
differences, but maybe less than there once were. There are starting to be workshops and
creative writing degrees in Ireland. Trinity College started one for the first time this year,
for instance. Young poets in both places are probably going to have more in common than
they used to. But those differences of history can be seen here as well. Emerging Irish poets
tend to feel at the center of things in Ireland. They give readings which are well attended.
The poetry and writing festivals are lively and warm and very communally based. I think
their equivalents in America feel that chill of isolation, not so much personally as through
the impersonal sense that they are not quite certain where they stand with their society.
Becoming a poet is not easy in either country, but maybe in Ireland it's still a less isolated
process than in the States. Then again, at Stanford I teach the Stegner Fellows, which is a
very distinctive and rewarding thing for anyone. These are very serious, very gifted poets,
on a Fellowship that gives them the shelter of time at the very moment when they're
preparing a first book. That's wonderful for me--it enables me to have a conversation about
poetry which I particularly value, and couldn't have in that way in Ireland.
Schmidt: How has physically bridging two cultures--teaching in California, maintaining a
home in Ireland--affected your own work? Has being removed, in a day-to-day way, from
Ireland changed the way you compose poems? The way you come across inspiration for a
poem? The imagery that's available to you?
Boland: It's not location, I think, that changes poems or poets. It's where they are in their
own work, what impasse or forward movement is there, that makes the difference. For a
long time, I've had a sort of dialogue going on in my mind--maybe even a quarrel--between
those elements of poetic experiment and bardic inheritance. The tension is in my own
work, and it's not where I am that adds or subtracts from it, but what I'm writing. I may
outwardly bridge cultures as you say, but inwardly as a poet I stay in the same place I've
always been, just trying to move from the unfinished business of one poem to the next.
Schmidt: You mentioned
the lyric is the lingua
franca of Irish poetry.
To what extent do you
feel, if at all, that your
ideas about feminism-the way those ideas
have infused your work-have created a
transnational poetics, a
sort of lingua franca
that addresses, for
example, the domestic
visions that women of a
certain class everywhere
can share?
Boland: I'm a feminist. I'm not a feminist poet. I've said somewhere else that I think
feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic. My
poetry begins for me where certainty ends. I think the imagination is an ambiguous and
untidy place, and its frontiers are not accessible to the logic of feminism for that reason.
So I don't really think it's created that poetics you speak of, in exactly that way. Where
feminism has influenced and anchored my view of things is in the making of a critique. And
it's one of the things I'm most uneasy about, looking back: that so much women's poetry
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pre-existed that critique. I think it needs a critique. Feminism is certainly a part of a book
like Object Lessons.
Schmidt: Perhaps the notion of a "transnational poetics" conveys a sense of the generic that
contradicts the intense feeling of place in your poems. Can you describe the process by
which the particular and the intimate become paradoxically emblematic, if that's the right
word, and therefore accessible?
Boland: Eliot has an interesting essay on Baudelaire that touches on this. He's writing about
the way Baudelaire pioneered certain kinds of urban reference and imagery, certain ways
of talking about the rain and dirt and downright squalor of a city. Then he stops and says-well, it isn't because he wrote about those images of the city; it's because (he says)
Baudelaire raised them "to the first intensity" that they matter. And of course, that's what
any poet writing about a particular place wants to do: to transform it, not just catalogue it.
When I was in a suburb in Dublin, at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, surrounded every
day by the same rowan trees and distances, I wanted to convey not just a place, but the
sort of bodily knowledge I got from place.
Schmidt: In your books of poems and certainly in your autobiographical prose, certain
ordinary images are repeated and lingered upon. Is this a way of making the ordinary
emblematic?
Boland: It wasn't that much of a strategy. I just wanted to find a way of conveying how
things change from the ordinary to the familiar, from the familiar to the known, from the
known to the visionary. How the same thing can be seen differently over and over again. I
was in a flat in Dublin when I was a student for a few years. It had a table in one room, a
window over a garden. There was nothing remarkable about any of it, except that
remarkable things happened to me there--I wrote my first real poems in that room and
began to believe and hope I was a poet there. When you go back to find those feelings in
memory, you can often only draw the map in terms of place and it has to be the perceived
place, not the actual one. The way a room looked, for instance, the hour after you wrote
your first sturdy poem in it.
Schmidt: In Object Lessons you mention reading Sylvia Plath at an early age, and later
Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. Is it possible to say something more about how each
poet's work has influenced your own, and if their work shares qualities you see as either
especially "American" or "feminine"?
Boland: It's an interesting question. Each of those poets has been very important to me.
Each of them leads me back into the American poetry they were nourished by, and
departed from, and returned to in certain ways. I can see Whitman better through Adrienne
Rich at times, than I can through some of his own poetry. I wish a more exact and exacting
critique had been made for Sylvia Plath. I think she was an American surrealist and is a too
often discussed as a character in an American melodrama. Bishop interests me so much
because she opened this fascinating space between voice and tone: her tone was so talky
and throwaway in her poems. Her voice was so dark, so achieved. The poem you hear
happens in the space between those two. Did she do that because she was American,
feminine, a formalist who de-stabilized forms by using them in new contexts? All of the
above, I'm sure. So it's hard to make the lines and draw the boundaries. They're also
precious to me, I won't deny it, because they opened the identity of the poet up for me.
They made that identity include their womanhood, and they found ways to explore and
articulate their womanhood through that identity. One of the reasons I feel so confirmed by
some of what has happened in American poetry is because of them. I found the courage to
be a poet in Ireland and it was a given that I was an Irish woman. But they gave me the
courage to believe that one identity need not limit or edit the other.
Schmidt: Do you feel that the intense discipline and technical mastery you concentrated on
as a young poet was a necessary stage on the way to writing "the full report of the reality
conveyed" to you? Do you feel that learning to write in particular forms helped you find the
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form that truly matched the later poem's inspiration? Or do you see those years of striving
to write in a more traditionally Irish voice as some kind of false start?
Boland: No, definitely not a false start. Every young poet, to some extent, writes the poem
in the air. And a certain kind of formal, well-structured poem was around me in the air
when I was young. I laboured to write it, and I learned to write it. And for part of that time
it was certainly someone else's poem I was learning and labouring to write. But an
apprenticeship in poetry, like in any other craft or art, is not necessarily a journey in selfdiscovery. I struggled with issues of the line and the voice in those forms. I learned a lot.
Schmidt: Reading your autobiographical prose, it is possible to see your growth as a poet in
cycles--from working at mastering traditional forms to working to find "that true meeting
between a hidden life and a hidden language out of which true form would come--the form
of a true poem?" Would you describe how two quite different recent poems, "The
Pomegranate" and "Lava Cameo," reflect this growth? How did you approach writing each
poem?
Boland: They're both important poems to me. "Lava Cameo" was written relatively quickly;
"The Pomegranate" took almost a year. Yeats has an interesting essay on the different kinds
of time in poetry, how English poems are meditative--he says they may be like "The Thames
Valley"--whereas Irish poetry has a sort of crisis time. I think there's truth in that. "Lava
Cameo" is about my grandmother and tries to compress a lost life into an image of
something ambiguous--a profile cut on volcanic rock. I can still see the antique stall where I
first saw a lava cameo. But the stanzas I used--fairly open, dissociated stanzas, capable of
covering ground and changing voices--were something I could manage at that time. "The
Pomegranate" was less easy. It's very easy to get a time fault in a narrative poem like that.
By time fault, I just mean that the poem can go quicker in some places and slower in
others. I had to struggle with syntax all the time, and go back, and go back again to get the
consistency I needed. I've often thought that there's a difference between revision and rewriting. Revision is brisk and business-like. Re-writing can become addictive. You start
again and start again. "The Pomegranate" seemed for months like a poem I was re-writing.
Then eventually I went back to it, and picked up something that felt like a tune, and
worked along with that. It's an important poem to me. It widens out to include things I
loved and wanted to bring together: my teenage daughter, Sarah, asleep in a room full of
magazines and Coke cans and cut apple. In other words, the disorganization of the beloved
moment. And then that fearless, organized structure which is legend. I just wanted to
introduce them to each other in the poem, the way they were already connected in my
mind.
This poem reflects Boland’s insistence on feminism as well as her Irish nationalism.
Consequently, the daughter and mother have several roles symbolically. In terms of
feminism, the mother states how the daughter is becoming stronger, wiser, more assertive,
and most importantly, more independent. Therefore, the mother’s metaphor of “winter
[being] in store for every leaf on every tree…” regarding to how she was ready to “make
any bargain to keep [the daughter]” foreshadows her daughter’s gateway into adulthood
and independence as she is able to survive by eating a pomegranate. Thus, the daughter
picks the pomegranate as opposed to “[the mother’s] heart-breaking search.”
Likewise, the daughter and mother symbolize Ireland and its motherland, England.
Consequently, the mother laments about her daughter’s feminism and independence. This
in turn, symbolizes the national tension and constant struggle between Ireland and England
over the Irish’s attempts to gain independence. The mother, also known as England,
acknowledges how “the legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She
will wake up.” Thus, England admits to the inevitability of Ireland’s passion for freedom,
happiness, and justice. Similar to a daughter growing up, England admits that once Ireland
changes, the daughter’s fate of rebellion and freedom is inevitable. Like the mother, the
daughter uses legend to restore history which symbolizes Ireland restoring its history and
state.
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It's A Woman's World
Our way of life
has hardly changed
since a wheel first
whetted a knife.
Maybe flame
burns more greedily
and wheels are steadier,
but we're the same:
who milestone
our lives
with oversights,
living by the lights
of the loaf left
by the cash register,
the washing powder
paid for and wrapped,
the wash left wet:
like most historic peoples
we are defined
by what we forget,
by what we never will bestar-gazers,
fire-eaters.
It's our alibi
for all time:
as far as history goes
we were never
on the scene of the crime.
When the king's head
gored its basketgrim harvestwe were gristing bread
or getting the recipe
for a good soup
to appetize
our gossip.
It's still the same:
By night our windows
moth our children
to the flame
of hearth not history.
And still no page
scores the low music
9
of our outrage.
Appearances
still reassure:
that woman there,
craned to the starry mystery,
is merely getting a breath
of evening air.
While this one hereher mouth
a burning plume she's no fire-eater,
just my frosty neighbour
coming home.
pomegranate
c.1320, poumgarnet, from O.Fr. pome grenate, from M.L. pomum
granatum, lit. "apple with many seeds," from pome "apple, fruit" +
grenate "having grains," from L. granata, fem. of granatus, from
granum "grain." The L. was malum granatum "seeded apple." It. form
is granata, Sp. is granada.
Etymology
The name "pomegranate" derives from Latin
pomum ("apple") and granatus ("seeded"). This
has influenced the common name for
pomegranate in many languages (e.g. German
Granatapfel, seeded apple). The genus name
Punica is named for the Phoenicians, who were
active in broadening its cultivation, partly for
religious reasons. In classical Latin, where
"malum" was broadly applied to many apple-like
fruits, the pomegranate's name was malum
punicum or malum granatum, the latter giving
rise to the Italian name melograno, or less
commonly melagrana.
A separate, widespread root for "pomegranate"
comes from the Ancient Egyptian rmn, from
which derive the Hebrew rimmôn, and Arabic
rummân. This root was given by Arabs to other
languages, including Portuguese (romã)[3],
Kabyle rrumman and Maltese "rummien". The
pomegranate ('rimmôn') is mentioned in the
Bible as one of the seven fruits/plants that Israel
was blessed with, and in Hebrew, 'rimmôn' is
10
also the name of the weapon now called the grenade. According to the OED, the word
grenade originated about 1532 from the French name for the pomegranate, la
grenade. La grenade also gives us the word grenadine, the name of a kind of fruit
syrup, originally made from pomegranates, which is widely used as a cordial and in
cocktails.
The myth of Persephone, the dark goddess of the Underworld, also prominently
features the pomegranate. In one version of Greek mythology, Persephone was
kidnapped by Hades and taken off to live in the underworld as his wife. Her mother,
Demeter (goddess of the Harvest), went into mourning for her lost daughter and thus
all green things ceased to grow. Zeus, the highest ranking of the Greek gods, could
not leave the Earth to die, so he commanded Hades to return Persephone. It was the
rule of the Fates that anyone who consumed food or drink in the Underworld was
doomed to spend eternity there. Persephone had no food, but Hades tricked her into
eating four pomegranate seeds while she was still his prisoner and so, because of this,
she was condemned to spend four months in the Underworld every year. During these
four months, when Persephone is sitting on the throne of the Underworld next to her
husband Hades, her mother Demeter mourns and no longer gives fertility to the earth.
This became an ancient Greek explanation for the seasons.
It should be noted that the number of seeds that Persephone ate is varied, depending
on which version of the story is told. The number of seeds she is said to have eaten
ranges from three to seven, which accounts for just one barren season if it is just three
or four seeds, or two barren seasons (half the year) if she ate six or seven seeds. There
is no set number.
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The Pomegranate
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.
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Anorexic
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
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I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
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That the Science of Cartography is Limited
-and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
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A QUESTION
EAVAN BOLAND
The poem here--"That the Science of Cartography is Limited"--was begun one February afternoon in
Dublin. I was working in a room upstairs which overlooked the back garden, although at that moment
there was almost nothing to see. I had the light on, my table was against the window. I had a longsided notebook, dark blue, bought at the news agents in Dundrum village, and a simple ballpoint.
Clean pages. The feel of plastic. The un-losable bulk and solidity of the notebook. It was the start of
the nineties. There was talk of violence and resolution in Ireland, as there had been for decades. I can
remember the uncurtained windows and the dark outside, the sound of my daughters in another room,
maybe a television on downstairs. But these are surfaces. Once the poem was finished I could follow it
back to another narrative, to a crisscrossing of memory and decision and private history.
Explaining a poem is difficult. The method is inherently unreliable. There is too much instinct and
error in the process to make its initiator a good witness afterwards. Akhmatova says of one stage in her
poetry "my handwriting had changed and my voice sounded different." But such clear beginnings are
rare. The truth is that every poem has a different hinterland: a terrain of chance and shadow, of images
in life which stay put until they become images in language. This piece is about a hinterland like that,
or at least about the guesswork involved in returning to it. If I engage in that guesswork, it will take me
back further than the rainy afternoon and the notebook and the writing of this poem.
There were no maps in our house when I was growing up, none that I remember. At least not in the
obvious places where I saw them in other houses--on the walls, framed, or as pages open on a table. If
there were I have no image of them. But there were maps at school. I went to a convent just north of
London, beginning there a few weeks late when I was six years of age. I had just come from Dublin
and the winter weather was starting to close in. Big, strange fogs swallowed the distances from early
morning till dusk. The classroom had an ugly electric light which had to be on all day. On the wall in
front of my desk was a map. The light turned it into a parchment-yellow with strange, rosy stains. It
was a map of the world. Or more properly, a map of empire. The cracked linen unrolled from a
wooden bar. The greenish seas edged up to big coral territories. Every day I sat there--six years old,
then eight, then ten--always coming back to the same classroom for history, for science, for English,
for religion. Always seeing a teacher in front of the map, speaking with certainty and precision. Often
entering the strange illusion and that the teacher was mute and the map was speaking through her.
Look what I own it said. See what you have lost.
This poem begins--or at least I intended it to--where maps fail. The deliberate awkwardness of the
proposition--that the science of cartography is limited--is built into the title and the title is the first line.
Why do that? Because I wanted to start this poem, charged as it was for me, with a deliberate mouthful
of reason and argument. I wanted to send it towards the reader the way an educator might send an
account of empire to a class: announcing acceptable ideas with an illusory logic. Of course this is
hindsight. There is never anything so conscious, certainly not in my mind, in the actual writing of a
poem. Nevertheless, this was a known and volatile area for me: this precept of map-making, territoryowning.
But if the ideas in a poem are difficult to get at, easy to simplify, the form is a more difficult
proposition still. I could say that I am skeptical about poets writing about form, if I hadn't so often
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enjoyed a poet's account of why a word, or a line is this way and not that. In this poem, the form is
relatively open. My background was in the lyric, and in the closed lyric at that. The Dublin of the early
sixties where I first thought about poetry, first argued about it, first published it, was a powerful and
closed world. The poem in the air, in the ethos, was a make-well lyric: stanzaic, rhyming, symmetrical
in argument. This was the poem I had laboured to write in my late teens and at the start of my
twenties--someone else's poem, not mine.
If, on that dark February afternoon, it was my own poem, it was because a complicated, and hard to
explain series of realizations had brought me there. I was, by now, in my forties. I had long ago grown
restive with the closed models of Irish lyric poems--and British as well. My feeling was that they
privileged the music and marginalized the voice. Since I had every instinct to go along with that when I
was young, I had painfully and determinedly come to a more fractured and open-ended line and stanza,
where the acoustics for the voice were better:
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
Those lines had an exact source for me. When I was first married, my husband Kevin--whose
people had come from Mayo and who had had been brought up in Meath--pointed out the
heartbreaking path of a famine road in a wood. The famine roads belonged to the second year of the
Irish famine. In 1847, the Relief Committees, coming to Ireland from the economic councils of Lord
Trevelyan and the British government, decided the Irish should work for their food. In the simple and
most understated testament of heartlessness, they required strength of those who had none. Where
those roads end in those woods is where those building them died.
Did that terrible line, that mark of death in the woods, immediately join that other image--of the
fogbound classroom, the map stained with power, the alien city and my first lessons in exile? Probably
not. An image, in a poem, is a strange archive. The key is only partly held by the poet. The reader
holds another part. The objective truth is hard to find and finally, probably unnecessary. But gradually,
these fragments joined into something in my mind. I was certainly aware, long before I wrote this
poem, that the act of mapmaking is an act of power and that I--as a poet, as a woman and as a witness
to the strange Irish silences which met that mixture of identities--was more and more inclined to
contest those acts of power. The official version-and a map is rarely anything else--might not be
suspect as it discovered territories and marked out destinations. But the fact that these roads, so
powerful in their meaning and so powerless at their origin, never showed up on any map of Ireland
seemed to me then, as it does now, both emblematic and ironic.
The poem had some other meanings for me as well. Those years-the eighties and nineties--were a
time of debate in Irish poetry about the nature of the political poem. What was a political poem? Who
was entitled to write it? But it was also a time when the resistances to women, to the unsettling of the
Irish canon were very visible. There seemed to be a belief in more conservative literary debate that
women might write the domestic poem, the poem about the suburbs, but not the mainstream Irish
political poem. This poem is a small inventory of my views. The political poem was at its best, I
believed-and Irish poetry had come to this late--when it was private at source. This is a poem with a
deliberate domestic world, just hinted at, just quickly sketched: myself and my husband in a wood,
looking down at those roads. It opens out into the considerations and darknesses which no domesticity,
no household, no love and no security is safe from. The meeting of those worlds is entirely deliberate.
This is not a long poem. Inasmuch as I could, I tried to put together the elements of voice with the
sequence of the narrative. I began it one afternoon and within a week or so it was finished. Some
definite articles were changed, some lines became shorter and others longer. Then I set it aside. Oddly
enough, I never submitted it for publication in that year or the next. But I put it as the first poem in a
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book I published a few years later called "In a Time of Violence." I remain connected to it because it
remains for me a small diagram of an argument most poets enter at some stage or another: who makes
the destination, who marks the way, where is authority, and who will contest it? If there are no exact
answers, at least there are questions. I hoped this poem would be one of them.
Degas's Laundresses
You rise, you dawn
roll-sleeved Aphrodite,
out of a camisol brine,
a linen pit of stiches,
silking the fitten sheets
away from you like waves.
You seam dreams in the folds
of wash from which freshes
the whiff and reach of fields
where it bleached and stiffened.
Your chat's sabbatical:
brides, wedding outfits,
a pleasure of leisured women
are sweated into the folds,
the neat heaps of linen.
Now the drag of the clasp.
Your wrists basket your waist.
You round to the square weight.
Wait. There behind you.
A man. There behind you.
Whatever you do don't turn.
Why is he watching you?
Whatever you do don't turn.
Whatever you do don't turn
See he takes his ease
staking his easel so,
slowly sharpening charcoal,
closing his eyes just so,
slowly smiling as if
so slowly he is
unbandaging his mind.
Surely a good laundress
would understand its twists,
its white turns,
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its blind designs --
it's your winding sheet.
In "Degas's Laundresses," Eavan Boland brings to life in words an oil painting by artist Edgar Degas.
Although in the title of the poem Boland does not specify which of Degas's several paintings of
laundresses she intends the reader to reference, it can only be "Laundresses Carrying Linen in Town."
The proof lies in the lines, "Your wrists basket your waist. / You round to the square weight" (l. 17-18),
which clearly describe the posture and gesture of the women in the painting. Though the effect of the
poem may be heightened by the reader's familiarity with the painting, Boland makes it possible to fully
enter the scene even without a tangible reference. Boland's use of the second person and innovative
word choice bring an immediacy to the painting unachieved by Degas himself. Where Degas seems to
treat his subjects purely with an aesthetic eye, Boland investigates the circumstances underlying the
single moment captured in the painting.
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Solitary
Night:
An oratory of dark,
a chapel of unreason.
Here in the shrubbery
the shrine.
I am its votary,
its season.
Flames
single
to my fingers
expert
to pick out
their heart,
the sacred heat
none may violate.
You could die for this.
The gods could make you blind.
I defy them.
I know,
only I know
these incendiary
and frenzied ways:
I am alone
no one’s here,
no one sees
my hands
fan and cup,
my thumbs tinder.
How it leaps
from spark to blaze!
I flush.
I darken.
How my flesh summers,
how my mind shadows
meshed in this brightness,
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how my cry
blasphemes
light and dark,
screams
land from sea,
makes word flesh
that now makes me
animal
inanimate,
satiate,
and back I go
to a slack tip,
a light.
I stint my worship,
the cold watch I keep.
Fires flint somewhere else.
I winter
into sleep.
A Woman Without A Country
As dawn breaks he enters
A room with the odor of acid.
He lays the copper plate on the table.
And reaches for the shaft of the burin.
Dublin wakes to horses and rain.
Street hawkers call.
All the news is famine and famine.
The flat graver, the round graver,
The angle tint tool wait for him.
He bends to his work and begins.
He starts with the head, cutting in
To the line of the cheek, finding
The slope of the skull, incising
The shape of a face that becomes
A foundry of shadows, rendering  —
With a deeper cut into copper  —
The whole woman as a skeleton,
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The rags of  her skirt, her wrist
In a bony line forever
severing
Her body from its native air until
She is ready for the page,
For the street vendor, for
A new inventory which now
To loss and to laissez-faire adds
The odor of acid and the little,
Pitiless tragedy of   being imagined.
He puts his tools away,
One by one; lays them out carefully
On the deal table, his work done.
Source: Poetry (April 2013).
And Soul
My mother died one summer—
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Empty deck chairs collected rain.
As I took my way to her
through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly
behind houses
and on curbsides, to pay her
the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something
I remembered
I heard once, that the body is, or is
said to be, almost all
water and as I turned southward, that ours is
a city of it,
one in which
every single day the elements begin
a journey towards each other that will never,
22
given our weather,
fail—
the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,
cloud color reaching into air,
the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,
salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,
as if that wasn't enough, all of it
ending up almost every evening
inside our speech—
coast canal ocean river stream and now
mother and I drove on and although
the mind is unreliable in grief, at
the next cloudburst it almost seemed
they could be shades of each other,
the way the body is
of every one of them and now
they were on the move again—fog into mist,
mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze
that lay on the railings of
the house she was dying in
as I went inside.
“And Soul” from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©2007 by Eavan Boland. Used by
permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: Domestic Violence (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2007)
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The Lost Land
I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.
I also wanted one piece of ground:
One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.
So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.
Now they are grown up and far away
and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:
Where the hills
are the colours of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:
At night,
on the edge of sleep,
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.
Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,
shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then
I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.
I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:
Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
“The Lost Land” from THE LOST LAND by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©1998 by Eavan Boland. Used by
permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: The Lost Land (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)
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