Eavan Boland Introduction
A literary life
Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. Her mother was the painter Frances Kelly and her father was the diplomat Frederick Boland, whose career moves resulted in her roving childhood and youth. From the age of six to twelve she lived in London, then in New York for a number of years, to return to Dublin when she was fourteen.
She was educated at Holy Child Convent, Killiney, County Dublin, then went on to Trinity College, first as a student and later as a lecturer in the English department. After a few years she embarked on a career as a literary journalist with the Irish Times, and she also presented a regular poetry programme for RTÉ radio.
New Territory
New Territory, her first book of poetry, published in 1967, contains the early poems, written between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, which were critically acknowledged at the time as talented, well-crafted work. Among its main concerns, this volume showed some preoccupation with the role of the poet, in pieces such as ‘The Poets’ and ‘New Territory’. It also contained the first of her poems about paintings and so introduced what was to become an important theme of Boland’s work: the stereotyped view of women in art and literature. ‘From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin’ shows the
peasant woman, defined by love and domestic duties, ‘her eyes mixed | Between love and market.’ The poet feels that artists throughout the centuries have ignored the real lives of women:
I think of what great art removes:
Hazard and death, the future and the past, This woman’s secret history and her loves…
In general this volume is in the mainstream of the Irish political–romantic poetic tradition, with its themes of exile (‘The Flight of the Earls’) and political martyrdom (‘A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail’); poems about Irish poets (‘Yeats in Civil War’ and ‘After the Irish of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’); and the retelling of legends (‘Three Songs for a Legend’ and ‘The Winning of Etain’). But her outlook was soon to change, under pressure of the unfolding political situation.
Religious and political antagonism in Northern Ireland exploded into violence from 1969 onwards. Few people were unmoved or unaffected by this. The violence spread southwards with the bombing of Dublin and Monaghan in
the function of art in a time of violence. In a seminal article on 7 June 1974 entitled ‘The Weasel’s Tooth’, she questioned the whole notion of cultural unity and accused Irish writing, influenced by Yeats, of fostering lethal fantasies for political activists:
Let us be rid at last of any longing for cultural unity in a country whose most precious contribution may be precisely its insight into the anguish of disunity …For there is, and at last I recognise it, no unity whatsoever in this culture of ours. And even more important, I recognise that there is no need
whatsoever for such a unity. If we search for it we will, at a crucial moment, be mutilating with fantasy once again the very force we should be liberating with reality: our one strength as writers, the individual voice, speaking in tones of outcry, vengeance, bitterness even, against our disunity but speaking, for all that, with a cool tough acceptance of it.
The War Horse
The second volume of poetry, The War Horse, published in 1975, reflects Boland’s concerns with violence and conflict in both private and community life.
She deals with many types of conflict: the Irish–English struggle, worrying families, and the conflict between lovers. The development of this theme ranges from a recognition of the killer instinct inherent in all nature, however domesticated (‘Prisoners’), to a consideration of notorious historical public moments of conflict and death (‘The Famine Road’, ‘The Greek Experience’ and ‘Child of Our Time’, which was written after the Dublin bombings of 1974) and the archetypal deadly conflict of fathers and sons (‘The Hanging Judge’ and ‘A Soldier’s Son’). The latter poem, in which a father kills his own son, has been read as ‘an image of a society at war with its own inheritance and future’. ‘The War Horse’, both a private and a political poem, brings a vivid personal awareness of destruction and war to leafy Dublin suburbia.
The feminine vision and view of the world is also a force in this volume. In ‘The Famine Road’ Boland equates the callous official lack of understanding of the famine victims with the offhand, male medical attitude meted out to a contemporary woman suffering from sterility. Racial suffering is equated with female suffering. In ‘Suburban Woman’ and ‘Ode to Suburbia’ she deals with the daily grind of the housewife and the conflict between a woman’s traditional role and her identity as a poet and creative artist:
Boland had by this time married and moved from her city flat and literary lifestyle to the Dublin suburb of Dundrum, where she was rearing her two daughters. These poems and others such as ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Child of
Our Time’ reflect an attempt to find and bring together her identity as wife, Irishwoman, poet and mother with her life in the suburbs.
In this volume also there are some beautiful and honest personal poems on family, love and friendship: ‘Sisters’, ‘The Laws of Love’, and ‘The Botanic Gardens’ – all demonstrating peaceful alternatives to conflict.
In Her Own Image
In 1976 she began to work simultaneously on her next two volumes of poetry, In Her Own Image, published in 1980, and Night Feed, published in 1982. In Her Own Image deals with individual private female identity, ‘woman’s secret history’. The poems explore taboo issues: anorexia, infanticide, mastectomy, menstruation, masturbation and domestic violence. Here is a cry to look at the reality of woman, her sexuality, desires, feelings of degradation, and failure to be understood.
‘Anorexia’ explores female suffering; ‘Mastectomy’ and ‘In His Own Image’ explore feelings of
degradation and see the female body as the object of man’s desire and of his need to control and shape: He splits my lip with his fist, shadows my eye with a blow, knuckles my neck to its proper angle.
What a perfectionist!
His are a sculptor’s hands: they summon form from the void, they bring me to myself again. I am a new woman.
‘Solitary’ suggests that only a woman knows the real sensual rhythms of her own body. ‘Tirade for the Mimic Muse’ and ‘Witching’ undermine the accepted conventional image of woman. ‘Tirade’ in
particular deflates the traditional male-created image of the muse as a beautiful girl, choosing instead to deal with the less picturesque reality:
I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout. So here you are fumed in candle-stink Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass. How you arch and pout in it!
How you poach your face in it!
I know you for the ruthless bitch you are: Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse – Our Muse of Mimic Art.
These are angry poems, featuring degraded states of women, in a sort of antilyric verse, yet they goad the reader into considering the reality of woman, not the image.
Night Feed
If In Her Own Image featured the dark side of ‘woman’s secret history’, Night Feed features the
suburban, domestic and maternal: the ordinary, traditional, everyday aspects of woman’s identity. The main sequence of poems, ‘Domestic Interior, 1–11’, focuses on the close bond between mother and child and explores the intensity of that maternal experience. It includes the now familiar ‘Night Feed’: This is dawn.
Believe me
This is your season, little daughter. The moment daisies open,
The hour mercurial rainwater Makes a mirror for sparrows. It’s time we drowned our sorrows. I tiptoe in.
I lift you up Wriggling
In your rosy, zipped sleeper. Yes, this is the hour
Housewife To this nursery Where you hold on, Dear life.
A silt of milk. The last suck.
And now your eyes are open, Birth-coloured and offended. Earth wakes.
You go back to sleep. The feed is ended. Worms turn. Stars go in.
Even the moon is losing face. Poplars stilt for dawn
And we begin
The long fall from grace. I tuck you in.
Also in this volume is a group of poems examining artistic images of women: ‘Degas Laundresses’, ‘Woman Posing’, ‘On Renoir’s The Grape Pickers’ and ‘Domestic Interior’. These women are either defined in relation to their work in field or kitchen or else are putting on a false, decorative pose, fulfilling the stereotyped image man created for them. Woman’s perceived need to comply with this idealised image of timeless beauty is satirised in such pieces as ‘The Woman Turns Herself into a Bush’, ‘The Woman Changes Her Skin’ and ‘A Ballad of Beauty and Time’. In this last poem plastic surgery is under the poet’s satirical knife:
A chin he had re-worked, a face he had re-made. He slit and tucked and cut.
‘A tuck, a hem,’ he said – ‘I only seam the line, I only mend the dress.
It wouldn’t do for you: your quarrel’s with the weave. The best I achieve is just a stitch in time.’
These fake images of woman, romanticised stereotypes, are set against the real defining moments in a woman’s history in the ‘Domestic Interiors’ sequence. On the one hand Boland is saying that it is these family relationships that are real and important, that identity can be found among the
washing-machines and children’s toys in suburbia. But she is also protesting that, traditionally, a woman has not had a choice about this. She has been imprisoned at hearth and home and so kept to the margins of society, removed from the centre of historymaking and power. Boland seeks a more equitable balance between ‘hearth and history’.
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
paid for and wrapped, the wash left wet: like most historic peoples we are defined
by what we forget, by what we never will be – star-gazers,
fire-eaters, It’s our alibi for all time:
as far as history goes we were never
on the scene of the crime. So when the king’s head gored its basket – grim harvest –
we were gristing bread or getting the recipe for a good soup to appetise our gossip… The Journey
Childhood in England: 1951’ and ‘Fond Memory’ provoked a consciousness of the poet’s own nation and how language defines a person:
…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.’
[‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’]
This consciousness of language as part of one’s identity prevails throughout the volume. Yet her relationship with her history and the women of history is not an easy one, and she resists going back to it in ‘Mise Éire’. She finds the grim reality of Irish women in history, soldiers’ whores or helpless
immigrants, difficult to confront: No. I won’t go back.
My roots are brutal: I am the woman – a sloven’s mix of silk at the wrists, a sort of dove-strut
in the precincts of the garrison – who practises
the quick frictions, the rictus of delight and gets cambric for it, rice-coloured silks. I am the woman in the gansy-coat
on board the ‘Mary Belle’, in the huddling cold,
and North over the dirty waters of the wharf mingling the immigrant guttural with the vowels of homesickness who neither knows nor cares that
a new language is a kind of scar and heals after a while into a passable imitation of what went before.
Yet these are the real women of the past, not those images created by many previous male poets, who idealised women and moulded them into metaphors of national sentiment and so created mythic national female figures.
Outside History
Outside History (1990), Boland’s sixth volume, is divided into three sections: ‘Object Lessons’, ‘Outside History: A Sequence’ and ‘Distances’. The object lessons, in the main, are what woman has learned about life. Some poems, such as ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’ and ‘The River’, reflect on the puzzling, almost inexplicable relationship between men and women and on their different perspectives on the world (‘Mountain Time’). Couples growing apart and breaking up are the focus of ‘Object Lessons’. We are made to feel in this sequence how fragile and transient is all human interaction, particularly in ‘We Were Neutral in the War’ and ‘Mountain Time’.
…darkness will be only what is left of a mouth after kissing or a hand laced in a hand… [‘Mountain Time’]
The female speaker senses that she is not regarded as significant, that she is marginalised, forced to the sidelines and excluded from the centre of happening history in ‘We Were Neutral in the War’.
he says. This could be what we all feared. You pierce a sequin with a needle. You slide it down single-knotted thread until it lies with all the others in
a puzzle of brightness. Then another and another one.
The female voices in these poems resemble ‘The Shadow Doll’, a mere replica of a bride, a protected image, locked in a vacuum. But the speaker is a poet, with her own recognised space, metaphorically represented as a room, and she reaches out to other women writers, trying to imagine ‘the rooms of other women poets’. She knows that the literary and creative world has been maledominated, but the gift has passed into her hands.
Bright-Cut Irish Silver I take it down
from time to time, to feel the smooth path of silver meet the cicatrice of skill.
These scars, I tell myself, are learned. This gift for wounding an artery of rock
was passed on from father to son, to the father of the next son;
is an aptitude for injuring earth
while inferring it in curves and surfaces; is this cold potency which has come, by time and chance,
Boland’s response to being marginalised as a woman poet is to explore alternative history. ‘So much that matters, so much that is powerful and frail in human affairs seems to me, increasingly, to happen outside history: away from the texts and symmetries of an accepted expression. And, for that very reason, at a great risk of being edited out of the final account’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, winter 1990).
Boland feels that significance is to be found in the margins of life also, that the unrecorded history of individuals is important too. And it is this alternative history that is the focus of the central section of the volume Outside History. In it she explores her own history, but this operates at both a personal and a universal level. Her own history can be read as a metaphor for the unrecorded female history of the nation. She explores her own personal history as a developing writer and poet. She is the young immature poet in ‘The Achill Woman’ who does not fully comprehend the significance of what she has experienced. She attempts to understand her developing self and to make connections between her present persona as a woman poet and her student past in ‘A False Spring’. She is forging an identity as a woman poet in ‘The Making of an Irish Goddess’, and she is the suburban woman seeking to re-establish contact with her natural and cultural roots in ‘White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland’. She finds real significance in moments of human experience, not in symbolic happening, in ‘We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History’.
She feels trapped by time, and as a woman she is alienated from the male dominated version of history in ‘An Old Steel Engraving’. She feels powerless and unable to influence history in ‘We Are Always Too Late’.
Many of the poems record a sense of incompleteness, such as ‘A False Spring’, which records the failure to find again her younger, student self and integrate that phase of her life with the embodied now. The lost cultural heritage, passed from mother to daughter but forgotten, is recorded in ‘What We Lost’. There is a keen sense of displacement in the poems. The au pair girls in ‘In Exile’ signify displaced woman, isolated by the barriers of language and by age and cultural differences. In the sequence we see Boland attempting to recover a sense of belonging and completeness by making connections with her personal history and her cultural history, but also by shedding the myth and the stereotyped image: out of myth into history I move to be
part of that ordeal…
The third section, ‘Distances’, focuses mostly on the past, the distant past of her childhood memories and the more recent past of occasional moments of insight.
In a Time of Violence, her seventh collection, was published in 1994. It is divided into three sections, the first of which is entitled ‘Writing in a Time of
Violence’. The poems in this section touch on specific national and historical issues and events, such as the Famine (‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’ and ‘March 1, 1847. By the First Post’), agrarian violence and the Peep o’ Day Boys (‘The Death of Reason’), the Easter Rising (‘The Dolls Museum in Dublin’), nineteenth-century women emigrants (‘In a Bad Light’) and language and nationality (‘Beautiful Speech’). But each is examined from an interesting and unusual angle, such as the unsympathetic and insensitive view of the Famine from a woman of the ascendancy class in ‘March 1, 1847. By the First Post’.
Many of the meditations are inspired by a visit to a museum or an exhibition. For example, the dress in a museum in St Louis featuring the work of Irish dressmakers sparked off thoughts of women’s servitude in exile in the nineteenth century (‘In a Bad Light’). But each event is re-created with authentic realism and each tale narrated with sympathy and affection. The poems offer fresh insights into old history as the poet focuses on the human experience behind these historical artefacts.
The poems in the second section, ‘Legends’, focus for the most part on women as mothers. The fierce protectiveness and the maternal side of women is portrayed in poems such as ‘This Moment’ and ‘The Pomegranate’. Woman as mother is playing an age-old role and has universal significance. The ageing woman features in ‘Moths’, ‘The Water Clock’, and ‘Legends’. Some of the poems stretch back to the poet’s own mother and grandmother through remembrance of a particular skill (‘The Parcel’) or a link with an heirloom (‘Lava Cameo’). Some, such as ‘Legends’, establish continuity with the next generation: Our children are our legends.
You are mine. You have my name. My hair was once like yours. And the world
is less bitter to me
because you will re-tell the story.
The main work of the third section is the title poem, ‘Anna Liffey’. It is, in the words of the author, ‘about a river and a woman, about the destiny of water and my sense of growing older’. This section concludes with four poems examining the unsatisfactory portrayal of women in myth, art and literature. The idealised images and the stereotypes are false and suffocating.
She appeals for realism and release in ‘A Woman Painted on a Leaf’: This is not death. It is the terrible
I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. Object Lessons
Her prose collection, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, appeared in 1995. In autobiographical mode, Boland traces her own development as a woman poet, recounts her search as a woman for some kind of arrangement with the male-dominated concept of the nation, and reviews the status of women in poetry and history.
Main Volumes of Poetry
Poems in this selection
New Territory (1967)
The War Horse (1975) ‘The War Horse’ ‘The Famine Road’ ‘Child of Our Time’
In Her Own Image (1980)
Night Feed (1982)
The Journey (1982)
The Journey and Other Poems (1986)
Selected Poems (1989)
Outside History (1990) ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’ ‘The Shadow Doll’ ‘White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland’ ‘Outside History’
In a Time of Violence (1994) ‘This Moment’ ‘Love’ ‘The Pomegranate’
