![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Eavan_Boland.jpg\" "\\"Eavan_Boland\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\nThis one hurts. Pioneering Irish poet Eavan Boland has died at the age of 75<\/a>. <\/p>\n Irish literature is clogged with big names. You always know who you are up against if you’re a writer. You have to “take on” Yeats. You have to “take on” Joyce. There are giants like Patrick Kavanagh to wrestle with. You have to carve out your own space. You have to get those other guys out of the way, just in order to have the confidence to continue.<\/p>\n “Guys” is right. While there have always been Irish women writers, more often than not, Irish women are the subject<\/i> of the literature, rather than the creators. Historically, it’s a macho field. (That’s changed and THEN some. Some of the best books I’ve read in the last 10 years have been by Irish writers who happen to be women.) Boland was one of the pioneering voices who changed all that.<\/p>\n Boland has the same concerns as the giant males of her generation – Seamus Heaney<\/a>, Michael Longley<\/a>, Derek Mahon<\/a> and others: what it means to be Irish, what it means to come to terms with history\/past, what it means to be an exile, either in your own land or elsewhere. They write about the sense of dislocation that is often the Irish birthright. Patrick Kavanagh<\/a> – a giant – was also a major influence, as well as an encouragement. New ground always needs to be opened up. Someone’s got to do it. <\/p>\n Boland attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which made her a fan of workshops forever. She created a workshop in Kilkenny that exists to this day. She got married. She had kids. It was the 70s. A hot and explosive time to be a woman who was also a writer. Sylvia Plath was a huge influence: not so much her tone, but her fearlessness with subject matter. We are talking about Life here. Men write about their lives and it is viewed as universal. Women write and it’s only about and for “women.” <\/p>\n The Irish writer, male or female, already has to deal with a sense of intimidation and potential-silencing because of the giants of the past. The Joyces, the Yeats’s, the Kavanaghs. You are influenced, whether you like it or not, but you resent it. You also love it. You need that inspiration, you are proud of it. But how on earth do you find the cajones<\/i> to take them all on? (Pardon the gendered language. You see the trouble here.)<\/p>\n Her influences were many. The emotion is in the line<\/i>. Watch for that.<\/p>\n “Pomegranate” was the first of hers I read.<\/p>\n Pomegranate<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n The only legend I have ever loved is Her poem “The Achill Woman” was a breakthrough for her. (More on that in the quote section below.) This was the moment, the revelation, similar to James Joyce’s “tundish” scene in Portrait<\/i> or Heaney’s first major poem “Digging.” Joining the history of a culture that had been suppressed, feeling a part of a long-scorned continuum. With Boland, there is the added tension of being a woman. <\/p>\n The Achill Woman<\/strong><\/big> She pushed the hair out of her eyes with The zinc-music of the handle on the rim I remember the cold rosiness of her hands. And she was nearly finished for the day. We stayed putting down time until The grass changed from lavender to black. but nothing now can change the way I went the harmonies of servitude, and how I fell asleep<\/p>\n oblivious to All the male poets at the time gave her the props for what she had done with “Achill Woman,” the space she opened up. It couldn’t have been written by a man, and they recognized that.<\/p>\n Michael Longley wrote a beautiful poem dedicated to Eavan Boland (posted it here<\/a>). Turns out there was room for her – but she had to make it herself. No one “stepped aside.” Life doesn’t work like that. Boldand’s work has withstood the upheavals of the sociopolitical upheavals of the 60s\/70s (in a way that many other strictly message-based feminist writers’ have not.) <\/p>\n Boland was in progress, always.<\/p>\n \nThe Oral Tradition<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n I was standing there only half-wondering We were left behind a distressed ochre \u2013 Two women They talked to each other \u2018She could feel it coming\u2019 \u2013 \u2018and she had on a skirt (Wood hissed and split \u2018… when she lay down It had started raining, staring at the night; the next the musical sub-text where she lay down the oral song I was getting out and I had distances singing innuendos, hints, Eavan Boland:<\/strong><\/p>\n I began to write in an Ireland where the word \u2018woman\u2019 and the word \u2018poet\u2019 seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other. Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word \u2018woman\u2019 invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word \u2018poet\u2019 \u2026 I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman\u2019s life. And I couldn\u2019t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets<\/a> Boland is a poet who understands what she is up to with uncanny clarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Melanie Rehak, The New York Times Book Review<\/em>:<\/strong> <\/p>\n [Her voice] is by now famous for its unwavering feminism as well as its devotion to both the joys of domesticity and her native Ireland.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland on Adrienne Rich’s Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law<\/i>: <\/strong><\/p>\n For this first time, we hear a distinctive note: the sound of a silenced woman suddenly able to voice a conventional suppression in terms of an imaginative one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt:<\/strong><\/p>\n [Boland] lived in London from the age of six to twelve, in a large residence, rather displaced by her accent and her culture from other children. “Some of the feelings I recognise as having migrated into themes I keep going back to – exile, types of estrangement, a relation to objects – began there.” Boland lived in New York for a time, returning to Ireland in her midteens to school. Before going up to university she took a job and saved to print her first pamphlet of poems in 1963. She attended Trinity College, Dublin. Hers is the generation of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Brendan Kennelly. Patrick Kavanagh< was as important to her as he was to them. But apart from the intellectual stimulus of that environment, there were deprivations she began to feel. The \"genderless poem\" is what was expected of her. There was the danger of becoming an honorary male poet or, in the cruel terminology of some feminist critics, a \"male-identified female poet.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Clare Wills, Times Literary Supplement<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Boland is a master at reading history in the configurations of landscape, at seeing space as the registration of time. If only we know how to look, there are means of deciphering the hidden, fragmentary messages from the past, of recovering lives from history\u2019s enigmatic scramblings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jay Parini, Poetry Review<\/em>: <\/strong><\/p>\n The literal site of these poems is often Ireland itself, with its heroic gestures, high rhetoric, and (sometimes pretentious) symbol-making held in abeyance, even fended off. Boland brilliantly attacks, and nullifies, this tradition. Boland is, in her quiet way, as melodramatic as any of her forbears. This is always what I have liked about her, the clash of intention and manifestation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland on Adrienne Rich: <\/strong><\/p>\n They contest the structure of the poetic tradition. They interrogate language itself. In all of this, they describe a struggle and record a moment which was not my struggle and would never be my moment … And yet these poems came to the very edge of the rooms I worked in, dreamed in, listened for a child’s cry in … I felt that the life I lived was not the one these poems commended. It was too far from the tumult, too deep in the past. And yet these poems helped me live it … Truly important poets change two things and never one without the other: the interior of the poem and eternal perceptions of the identity of the poet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Anne Fogarty, Irish Book Review<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n [New Collected Poems] acts as a timely reminder of the significance and innovatory force of Boland\u2019s achievement as a poet and of the degree to which so many of her texts \u2026 have lastingly altered the contours of Irish writing. Modern Irish poetry would be unthinkable without her presence. New Collected Poems<\/em> valuably updates the record of Eavan Boland\u2019s artistic output. More vitally, it underscores the vibrancy of her ongoing project as a poet who is doubtless one of the foremost writers in contemporary Ireland.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland:<\/strong><\/p>\n I had the good fortune to meet [Patrick] Kavanagh when I was still a student. I sat across from him in a caf\u00e9 at the bottom of Grafton Street, where they still turned and gritted the coffee beans in the window. Our conversation was brief but memorable, at least for me. And yet it would be years before I could unpick the legendary threads, the second-hand mythology of the poet. Once I did I could bring with me into later life not an image of sitting across from him, but the less easily realized shape of a writer of persistence and craft: an innovative and dissenting poet, neither afraid of the limits of his subject matter nor the reach of his own imagination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland: <\/strong><\/p>\n My father had a superb intelligence, but it was a rational one…[My mother introduced] this wonderful fragrance of the unrational, the inexplicable, the eloquent fragment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt: <\/strong><\/p>\n In “The Achill Woman,” the poet, a student preparing for finals, retires to a rural croft to revise “the Court poets of the Silver Age” and one evening encounters a countrywoman, speaks with her and begins to find herself. It is an incident to which Boland has referred in prose essays and interviews, the point at which she began to apprehend her Irishness and her womanhood as something given, positive and in the broadest sense political… The poets she could no longer comprehend were those who, like Spenser and Ralegh, had fought to control the ancestors of that Achill woman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland: <\/strong><\/p>\n What went into the Irish poem and what stayed outside it was both tense and hazardous for an Irish woman poet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt: <\/strong><\/p>\n Irish women have had to negotiate from being objects<\/em> in the Irish poem to being authors of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland: <\/strong><\/p>\n “[I am] an indoor nature poet … [Nature poets]… like Frost or the best of John Clare, for example. Their lexicon is the overlooked and the disregarde. They are revelatory poets. They single out the devalued and make a deep, metaphorical relation between it and some devalued parts of perception … What happens is that the poet becomes the agent in the poem for a different way of seeing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt:<\/strong><\/p>\n Kavanagh, [Austin] Clarke and Padraic Fallon had to work out from the great poem of Yeats; they had to “write a whole psychic terrain back into it.” Indeed, the overshadowed Irish poet, the poet who isn’t Yeats, or Heaney, has always to clear a space in the shadow of these presences. Boland was writing “a whole psychic terrain” into the Irish poem as well, not again but for the first time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland: <\/strong><\/p>\n [Feminism is] an enabling perception but it’s not an aesthetic one. The poem is a place – at least for me – where all kinds of certainties stop. All sorts of beliefs, convictions, certainties get left on that threshold. I couldn’t be a feminist poet. Simply because the poem is a place of experience and not a place of convictions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland on Outside History<\/em> (1990): <\/strong><\/p>\n Here I was in a different ethical area. Writing about the lost, the voiceless, the silent. And exploring my relation to them. And – more dangerous still – feeling my ways into the powerlessness of an experience through the power of expressing it. This wasn’t an area of artistic experiment. It was an area of ethical imagination, where you had to be sure, every step of the way – every word and every line – that it was good faith and good poetry. And it couldn’t be one without the other. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael Schmidt:<\/strong><\/p>\n [Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poesy<\/em> (1595)] is a justification of the freedom of language, exploration and concern that poetry might enable. The strategy Sidney adopts, which is not to answer the attack but to advocate “in parallel,” is a rhetorical approach rarely used. In recent years Eavan Boland, trying within Irish poetry to clear a female space, employs the same kind of unaggressive, reasonable and reasoned strategy. It is hard to answer because it adjusts the counters of argument in an unexpected way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland on In a Time of Violence<\/em> (1994): <\/strong><\/p>\n I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. That’s a very different undertaking for a woman poet than for a poet like Yeats … A woman poet has to grow old in poems in which she has been fixed in youth and passivity: in beauty and ornament. The sexual has to be separated from the erotic … The woman poet has to write her poem free of any resonance of the object she once was in it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eavan Boland, interview in The New Yorker<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cSo much of European love poetry is court poetry, coming out of the glamorous traditions of the court \u2026 There\u2019s little about the ordinariness of love. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “I began to know that I had to bring the poem I’d learned to write near to the life I was starting to live. And that if anything had to yield in that process, it was the poem not the … Continue reading
\nthe story of a daughter lost in hell.
\nAnd found and rescued there.
\nLove and blackmail are the gist of it.
\nCeres and Persephone the names.
\nAnd the best thing about the legend is
\nI can enter it anywhere. And have.
\nAs a child in exile in
\na city of fogs and strange consonants,
\nI read it first and at first I was
\nan exiled child in the crackling dusk of
\nthe underworld, the stars blighted. Later
\nI walked out in a summer twilight
\nsearching for my daughter at bed-time.
\nWhen she came running I was ready
\nto make any bargain to keep her.
\nI carried her back past whitebeams
\nand wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
\nBut I was Ceres then and I knew
\nwinter was in store for every leaf
\non every tree on that road.
\nWas inescapable for each one we passed.
\nAnd for me.
\nIt is winter
\nand the stars are hidden.
\nI climb the stairs and stand where I can see
\nmy child asleep beside her teen magazines,
\nher can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
\nThe pomegranate! How did I forget it?
\nShe could have come home and been safe
\nand ended the story and all
\nour heart-broken searching but she reached
\nout a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
\nShe put out her hand and pulled down
\nthe French sound for apple and
\nthe noise of stone and the proof
\nthat even in the place of death,
\nat the heart of legend, in the midst
\nof rocks full of unshed tears
\nready to be diamonds by the time
\nthe story was told, a child can be
\nhungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
\nThe rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
\nThe suburb has cars and cable television.
\nThe veiled stars are above ground.
\nIt is another world. But what else
\ncan a mother give her daughter but such
\nbeautiful rifts in time?
\nIf I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
\nThe legend will be hers as well as mine.
\nShe will enter it. As I have.
\nShe will wake up. She will hold
\nthe papery flushed skin in her hand.
\nAnd to her lips. I will say nothing. <\/p>\n
\nShe came up the hill carrying water.
\nShe wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan,
\na tea-towel round her waist.<\/p>\n
\nher free hand and put the bucket down.<\/p>\n
\ntuned the evening. An Easter moon rose.
\nIn the next-door field a stream was
\na fluid sunset; and then, stars.<\/p>\n
\nShe bent down and blew on them like broth.
\nAnd round her waist, on a white background,
\nin coarse, woven letters, the words \u201cglass cloth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nAnd I was all talk, raw from college\u2014
\nweek-ending at a friend\u2019s cottage
\nwith one suitcase and the set text
\nof the Court poets of the Silver Age.<\/p>\n
\nthe evening turned cold without warning.
\nShe said goodnight and started down the hill.<\/p>\n
\nThe trees turned back to cold outlines.
\nYou could taste frost<\/p>\n
\nindoors, chilled by the wind
\nand made a fire
\nand took down my book
\nand opened it and failed to comprehend<\/p>\n
\nthe grace music gives to flattery
\nand language borrows from ambition\u2014<\/p>\n
\nthe planets clouding over in the skies,
\nthe slow decline of the Spring moon,
\nthe songs crying out their ironies.<\/p>\n
\nat the end of a reading
\nor a workshop or whatever,
\nwatching people heading
\nout into the weather,<\/p>\n
\nwhat becomes of words,
\nthe brisk herbs of language,
\nthe fragrances we think we sing,
\nif anything.<\/p>\n
\nin a firelit room
\nin which the colour scheme
\ncrouched well down \u2013
\ngolds, a sort of dun<\/p>\n
\nand the sole richness was
\nin the suggestion of a texture
\nlike the low flax gleam
\nthat comes off polished leather.<\/p>\n
\nwere standing in shadow,
\none with her back turned.
\nTheir talk was a gesture,
\nan outstreched hand.<\/p>\n
\nand words like \u2018summer\u2019
\n\u2018birth\u2019 \u2018great-grandmother\u2019
\nkept pleading with me,
\nurging me to follow.<\/p>\n
\none of them was saying –
\n\u2018all the way there,
\nacross the fields at evening
\nand no one there, God help her<\/p>\n
\nof cross-woven linen
\nand the little one
\nkept pulling at it.
\nIt was nearly night …\u2019<\/p>\n
\nin the open grate,
\nbroke apart in sparks,
\na windfall of light
\nin the room\u2019s darkness)<\/p>\n
\nand gave birth to him
\nin an open meadow.
\nWhat a child that was
\nto be born without a blemish!\u2019<\/p>\n
\nthe windows dripping, misted.
\nOne moment I was standing
\nnot seeing out
\nonly half-listening<\/p>\n
\nwithout warning
\nI was caught by it:
\nthe bruised summer light,<\/p>\n
\nof mauve caves on lilac
\nand the laburnum past
\nand shadow where the lime
\ntree dropped its bracts
\nin frills of contrast<\/p>\n
\nin vetch and linen
\nand lifted up her son
\nto the archive
\nthey would shelter in:<\/p>\n
\navid as superstition,
\nlayered like an amber in
\nthe wreck of language
\nand the remnants of a nation.<\/p>\n
\nmy coat, buttoning it,
\nshrugging up the collar.
\nIt was bitter outside,
\na real winter\u2019s night<\/p>\n
\nahead of me: iron miles
\nin trains, iron rails
\nrepeating instances
\nand reasons; the wheels<\/p>\n
\noutlines underneath
\nthe surface, a sense
\nsuddenly of truth,
\nits resonance.<\/p>\nQUOTES:<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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