New Collected Poems

Reviews / Votes

John Redmond, The Guardian, Saturday 18th February 2006

In the heaven of lost futures

John Redmond admires Eavan Boland's forlorn, regretful collection.

Should a poem want to stop? In The End of the Poem, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben associates the conclusion of any poem with a crisis, a catastrophe, in which the poem fears its identity may be lost as it plunges down towards prose. Yet some poets enjoy the crisis so much that their poems end many times. Such a writer is Eavan Boland, for whom the full-stop might have been invented. Using unusually emphatic line-endings, her poems appear to relish cutting themselves. A Boland poem often begins with a one-word line which is also a one-word sentence: "Dusk." "Look." "August." "Ballyvaughan." Pursuing a staccato aesthetic draws some of the poems into self-parody but others, such as "This Moment" are pleasantly atmospheric: "A neighbourhood. / At dusk. // Things are getting ready / to happen / out of sight. //Stars and moths. / And rinds slanting around fruit."

Few other poets, I think, would use a full-stop to separate the first two lines - or the last two lines. Typically, the poems creep forward cautiously, full-stop by full-stop, as though trying to hear the echo of their own footsteps. Such a style suits the forlorn, emptied-out environments one finds everywhere in this book: still, suburban houses that feel like stage-sets into which a character from Pinter or Beckett might walk - and doesn't.

Living in the comfortable suburbs of south Dublin, Boland came to maturity as a writer in a period when poets from the republic were decisively dominated by their colleagues from Northern Ireland. Some of those northern poets, like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, she knew well from student days in 60s Dublin. Carving out a poetic identity at such a time was not easy. Before her emergence, Irish poetry, north and south, had been notoriously male. So it is quite understandable that much of the critical reception of Boland's work has focused on the difficulties she faced as a woman writer. In a lyric voice that was new to Irish poetry, she addressed the depression and loneliness of suburban womanhood:

A child

shifts in a cot.

No matter what happens now

I'll never fill one again.

As well as the subject-matter, the stiff, self-editing quality of her tone helped to convey an overwhelming sense of repression. But this tone was not there from the start. Boland's early work was blandly derivative: a blend of Yeats and Auden with bits of Longley and Mahon thrown in. The decisive break came in 1980 with the publication of the pamphlet In Her Own Image and the collection Night Feed. In these two publications, Boland's line drastically shortened, the full-stops multiplied, the subject-matter sharpened, and a new voice was adopted: that of Sylvia Plath. Indeed, In Her Own Image and Night Feed are so closely modelled on Plath's Ariel that they are practically imitations. Boland's "Menses" is a good example: "I am the moon's looking-glass. / My days are moon-dials. / She will never be done with me. / She needs me. / She is dry."

Boland has not concealed her influences - her prose memoir, Object Lessons, admits them - but she has seemed more comfortable citing as an example another American poet, Adrienne Rich. This is despite noticeable differences of temperament. While both are feminists, Rich is an "activist" in a way that Boland is not. When Rich argues on behalf of "a lesbian continuum" (by which she means an intense, not necessarily sexual, sense of solidarity between women) she employs exactly the kind of daring language that Boland would never use. But Rich has been useful to Boland as a kind of ideological touchstone, supplying an explicit, intellectual framework to which she can point.

To read Boland's work though the spectacles of gender, however, is not always helpful. Her best work occupies the narrow, negative terrain of emotional self-denial that no gender really owns. A sentiment we find in Mahon's "Leaves", for example, is very close to the heart of Boland's work: "Somewhere in the heaven / Of lost futures / The lives we might have lived / Have found their own fulfilment." Her poems regret, as Mahon's do, what might have been, but they do not articulate the might-have-been. To paraphrase Mahon, their conviction, that they could have been more than what they are, is what they are.

Those wishing to investigate Boland's work might do better to start with the more manageable Outside History, which selects from the crucial period 1980-90. The over-inclusiveness of New Collected Poems, particularly of material predating 1980, dilutes the quality of the book. It is, we sense, "for the record" - and we're going to experience all of the record whether we like it or not.

Given that much of the most promising poetry in Ireland today is being written by young women (Caitriona O'Reilly, Vona Groarke, Sinead Morrissey, to name a few), literary history may eventually see Boland's writing as a necessary stepping-stone. Something of this is suggested by Boland herself in "Is it Still the Same", one of the book's concluding poems. There she contemplates the position of a younger woman poet and wonders if, compared with her own day, conditions have changed. The poem ends with three lines which are self-regarding but fair:

I wrote like that once.

But this is different.

This time, when she looks up,

I will be there. Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Times, 4th February, 2006:

Surviving the swans

Evan Boland's latest collection illustrates how she managed to escape from the grip of tradition

Reading Eavan Boland's powerful oeuvre in the New Collected Poems, one is immediately struck by the idea that persistent moral courage is a powerful technical advantage in a poet's work. Moral courage rearranges ideas around itself like a determined child dragging a blanket full of toys, clothes and food. It is typical of Boland's courage that she has opened her New Collected Poems with an in-your-face provocation: 'I have retrieved two poems from 23 Poems, a chapbook which came out in 1962 when I was eighteen.' Unlike our politicians and terrorists, she has removed all camouflage from every previous position. We now see the process of Eavan Boland's work in all its awkward clarity. This awkwardness includes those diabolical creatures of Kavanagh and Yeats-saturated Dublin in the 1960s - swans and refrains:

O swan by swan my heart goes down

Through Dublin town, through

Dublin town

(Liffeytown)

What is astonishing about Eavan Boland and the august generation who surround her - Eilaan N Chuilleaniin, Derek Mahon, Eamon Grennan, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley - is that they survived the intensity of that post-War obsession with the Olympians of the Celtic Twilight. The strategies they developed to escape from Yeats are as interesting and complex as the Celtic Twilight itself. In many ways, Boland, cosmopolitan, well-connected, brilliant, was most likely to remain as a polished and influential Dublin commentator. But her highly developed moral character was sure to land her in trouble, and this trouble allowed her to disintegrate adroitly into a modern poet's life. Isolated in the suburbs, visited by real Travellers' horses rather thanPegasus, Boland induced a trauma into Irish poetry for the first time, a politicised feminist viewpoint, a view that was neither traditional nor twilit. This New Collected is the best evidence of that escape from Yeats; of that ne wlife - a woman's life - that she found in poetry.

We make the work, but the work makes who we are. In very many ways it was from the constituency of In Her Own Image and Night Feed (both 1980) that Mary Robinson was elected President of Ireland - as surely as Douglas Hyde was selected from The Love Songs of Connaught and the prose of An Craoibhin Aoibhinn. Boland's 1967 volume New Territory contains 'The Winning of Etain', an ambitious 38-stanza abababcc-rhymed work of Yeatsian power and a quiver-full of short lyrics dedicated to that TCD band of Kennelly, Norris, Mahon, Grennan, etc, and including 'A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol' as well as 'The Flights of the Earls'

So we are left

Writing to the headstones and forgotten

princes

Boland has inserted 'from Femininity and Freedom' a fragment of a 1971 play, betweenNew Territory and The War Horse of 1975. This dialogue between Cathal and Deidre contains nothing of importance except the title that seems like the cry of an introductory chorus, a chorus that announces the isolated suburban existence of a young wife in the bleak years of the Heavy Gang and the fall of the Stormont Assembly. Her 'let-downs and erosions' (to use Seamus Heaney's phrase) had a maternal focus:

You stand in our kitchen, sip

Milk from a mottled cup

From our cupboard. Our unease

Vanishes with one smile

As each suburban, modern detail

Distances us from old lives

Old deaths, but nightly on our screen

New ones are lost, wounds open

(Naoise at Four)

From this work of 1975 to The Journey (1987) Boland sought a determinedly personal, elemental alternative to the common national mythologies. Through the lens of motherhood she discovered the extreme absence of women from political history. In Night Feed and In Her Own Image she developed an aesthetic of menstruation and child-birth, of witchcraft and anorexia: "Flesh is heretic. / My body is a witch. / I am burning it." The intensity of this journey was what distinguished Boland's poetic personality at this time. In The Oral Tradition she overhears women in conversation, leading to a profound insight on history, especially Irish history:

The oral song

avid as superstition,

layered like an amber in

the wreck of language

and the remnants of a nation.

In poems such as 'The Unlived Life' she celebrates quilt-making ("why, you're free to choose"), in 'Lace' she seeks out a language like lace (through which she may lose her sight) and in 'Envoi' these words speak volumes:

My muse must be better than those of men

who made theirs in the image of their myth.

By 1998, Boland had made an extraordinary journey, from myth to motherhood to myth of motherhood. The Lost Land is an extraordinary attempt to make new art on old ground; rich poems, deeply personal in that formalised way of feeling so characteristic of Boland or derek Mahon. The poems of Code (2001) are equally insightful anti-histories brought to poetry by a genius with "her ivory lyre and her hair neatly tied."

This New Collected Poems is an important document: it is the finest evidence ever assembled of the escape from the grip of a tradition. If the procedure of Art is to resist the real while conferring unity upon it, then Eavan Boland, in resisting male histories, has conferred a new meaning upon the phrase 'Ir'sh poetry.' How blessed we all are that she abandoned swans. Anne Fogarty, The Irish Book Review, Volume I Number III Winter 2005:

Books of collected poems fulfil several competing purposes. They consolidate artistic achievement by creating a sense of overview and neat chronological progression. But they also defamiliarise. The individual volumes of a poet's work seem more porous and unstable when they sit alongside each other in an anthology

It is ten years since Eavan Boland published her initial Collected Poems. This new volume adds one hundred pages to the previous work. Such amplitude results not just from the addition of her two recent books, The Lost Land and Code, but also from the inclusion of almost all of her early poems along with an excerpt from an unpublished verse play, Femininity and Freedom. As a result, this extended collection provides tantalising insights into the beginnings of Boland's career in the early 1960s, while also allowing the reader to juxtapose and interleave poems from several decades.

The assurance of her startling poetic debut, New Territory, in 1967 is merely enhanced by the new-found glimpse into preceding work that appeared in a chapbook in 1962. moreover, the sudden shift to suburban themes in her second collection, The War Horse, is now bridged by the Yeatsian experiment of a verse drama focusing on the figure of Deidre. Symbolically, in this new view of Boland's progress as a poet, the legendary figure of a woman in Irish myth cedes to the discovery of a female perspective on experience, with its concentration on the concrete details of modern suburban life.

Boland's abiding concern with the necessity to renegotiate literary tradition is also brought more sharply into focus by this collection. Dialogues with other poets, including Michael Longley, Eamonn Grennan and Derek Mahon, punctuate her first collection, while an elegy for Michael Hartnett closes her most recent volume. These colloquies permit an insistent questioning of the boundaries of literary tradition and of the function and reach of poetry. Such iconoclasm leads, paradoxically, in all of Boland's work to a quest for the illuminating properties of a poetic vision once it has been shorn of its false pretensions. The lament for Hartnett avers that there 'was no Orpheus in Ireland.'

Nonetheless, it ends with the discovery of music in aremembered noise, the "sound / of a bird's wing", from a lost language. Although the moment of revelation is determinedly withheld, it is also precisely realised.

The elongated perspectives of this new survey of Boland's work also reveal her capacity to revisit the distinctive preoccupations that she has staked out as the preserve of her oeuvre from the very beginning. A recent poem, 'Suburban Woman: Another Detail', returns to the symbolic, of-centre locus of the suburb and constructs a less anxious but more angular view of the woman with a child in an isolated domestic space. Similarly, 'The Lost Land' interfuses with perspectives of earlier poems about the bonds between mothers and daughters and the problem of recovering the past and deconstructs the talismanic words that underlay them: "Ireland. Absence. Daughter." 'Escape' wittily uses the present-day scene of a swan nesting near Leeson Street Bridge to exorcise a youthful fascination with the poetic resonance of the story of the Children of Lir.

Boland's recent volumes have become increasingly spare and honed. They continue, however, her quest for what she dubs 'a formal feeling', the patterns made feasible by the architectonics of poetic language. The abstract play of light and shadow and of isolated words takes precedence over large-scale attempts to establish grandiose truths.

If a new mood and tone pervade her publications in the last decade, their commitment to the retrieval of occluded histories continues unabated as does their revisionary force. Her quizzical anti-love poems, written to mark her thirtieth wedding anniversary, unfurl a moving account of the mutations of married love. Equally, her works remains loyal to its concern with excavating a plethora of forgotten lives, whether of her parents in holiday in Connemara or of anonymous Irish emigrants making the journey to America.

New Collected Poems is a rich and welcome compendium. It acts as a timely reminder of the significance and innovatory force of Boland's achievement as a poet and of the degree to which so many of her texts such as 'Night Feed', 'The Pomegranate' and 'That the Science of Cartography is Limited' have lastingly altered the contours of Irish writing. Modern Irish poetry would be unthinkable without her presence. New Collected Poems valuably updates the record of Eavan Boland's 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. John Greening, Times Literary Supplement, 27th October 2006.

On the Sunny Side

The narrative behind the development of Eavan Boland's poetry is told in her prose book, Object Lessons, with its confrontation of the way 'Irish women poets had gone from being the objects of the Irish poem to being its authors'. Her studies of suburban life, a kind of seething pastoral, offer rich pickings for feminism, and her middle period poems reveal the influence of Adrienne Rich, among others. But she doesn't just describe domestic bonds, she makes us hear her feelings in the very dullness of the half-rhymes: 'The stilled hub / and polar drab / of the suburb'. These lines are from a poem ('monotony') in the early collection Night Feed (1980), the book in which Boland begins to go beyond the ordinary by writing about it; she escapes the angry jabbing of In Her Own Image (also 1980) in a series of quieter interiors. She had already been tuning up in the title poem of The War Horse (from 1975 - here, sadly, reprinted with 'crop' for 'clop'): the image of a powerful beast trampling leafy suburbs provides a key to later poems. 'Did you know our suburb was a forest?' she is asking in 2001, reminding us that there is folklore beyond the net curtains. The early sequence 'Suburban Woman' and 'Ode to Suburbia' suggest that there is 'no magic here', yet there is a Yeatsean need for something like magic - myth, fairy tale.

Boland would find it with astonishing assurance (after a seven-year struggle) in the poems from her great Rasumovsky period: The Journey (1987), Outside History (1990) and In a Time of Violence (1994). In 'The Oral Tradition', the half-heard talk of local women catches her ear, 'the oral song / avid as superstition, / layered like an amber in / the wreck of language / and the remnants of a nation'. In 'The Achill Woman', the islander plays counterpoint to the student Eavan's reading of 'The Court Poets' with its 'harmonies of servitude'.The strange harmonies Boland herself creates in these books (together with their compelling 'oral' narratives) are what deservedly brought her a wider readership. relying more on sound and syntax, subtleties of tone, line-break and caesura than the trampling warhorse of metre, her most celebrated poems are beautifully balanced: 'That the Science of Cartography is Limited', gradually revealing to us the presence of the old famine road; or 'The Water-Clock', dripping musically down the page:

Thinking of ageing on a summer day

of rain and more rain

I took a book down from a shelf

and stopped to read

and found myself -

how did it happen? -

reflecting on

the absurd creation of the water-clock.

Drops collected

on the bell-tongues of fuchsia

outside my window.

Apple-trees

dripped...

Not much contemporary free verse is as easy as this to memorize. Many of Boland's best poems begin with light, often in summer (a favourite word), many with rain or impending gloom, with the 'in-between, / neither here-nor-there hour of evening': 'The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me' is a well-known example, its brooding opening equalled only by the cinematic brilliance of the fan transformed to a blackbird's wing: 'the whole, full, flirtatious span of it'.

If Boland knew where she was heading by her middle period, there were plenty of diversions along the way: art, movies, memories of her school years in England, encounters with ancient Irish poets, with Horace, Mayakovsky, Nelly Sachs. There is a delightful poem about 'Anon'. But in more recent collections, those since her first Collected Poems of 1995, there is a sense that the poems are not surprising her quite enough, although there are fine individual pieces in both The Lost Sand (1998) and Code (2001). The former in particular shows the danger of knowing too clearly what you want to write about - too much of the sunlight she loves, not enough of the 'tenant moon'. It could be that working in California, where she is now a professor at Stanford University, has (besides keeping her on the sunny side) led her to this uncluttered, unironic style - she implies as much in 'The Necessity for Irony'. These poems shun the loaded word, employ less showy syntax, shorter sentences. There is little internal music. Boland has always liked rhetorical repetitions, but now she freeze-frames single words or phrases: 'The earth shows its age and makes a promise / only myth can keep. Summer. Daughter. Yet, ironically, there is some danger of drifting into a neo-Celtic twilight in some of the poems, such as 'The Colonists'.: 'They are holding maps. / But the pages are made of failing daylight. / The tears, made of dusk, fall across the names'. Code, however, seems to be reclaiming some of her earlier richness: a return to form in more ways than one - and a return to her suburban omphalos. But the title poem, dedicated to Grace Murray Hopper, 'maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL', suggests that this is a poet still looking for 'a new language' (something she dreamt of back in Night Feed. Though she may have written some poems 'to grow old in', she has yet to make for herself a language fit for a memorable 'Late Period'. Yet Eavan Boland has already come so far, it would be no surprise if she suddenly produced a Grosse Fuge. Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review Volume 96:3 Autumn 2006

Swept, Emptied, Kept

Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century. No-one has articulated with more poise the dilemmas of being a woman poet in Ireland. An early feminist, she wrote with her young children around her, finding poetry in early morning bottle-feeds and 'woman's secret history' before such concerns were fashionable. She has other powerful themes: emigration, exile, the violence of Irish history, death in famine. In her latest books she explores the stoicism of daily life, and the intensities of a long marriage.

Looking back through New Collected Poems, it becomes clear that the originality lies in her control of language and tone rather than her own experience. She is one of the few poets able to brush against the vocabulary of late Plath and not lose her own voice. That is because she can make use of Plath's innate surrealism, and extends her metaphors with some wit, for instance in 'Anorexic':

Flesh is heretic.

My body is a witch.

I am burning it.

She understands how women - 'swept, emptied, kept' - come to accept the compromises of routine. But her vision of female choices goes deeper. She rages against the Muse of mirrors - 'You slut. You fat trout' - and all the female tools used to escape the kitchen and the stink of nappies:

Eye-shadow, swivel brushes, blushers

Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks

Ice for the pores, a mud mask

All the latest tricks.

Unlike Akmatova, say, who trusts her own Muse as unchanging, Boland knows there are many Muses, some of them women writers from other ages. 'The Journey' is one of her most passionate poems. Taking off from that section of the Aeneid which describes the crying unborn babies, Boland is led by Sappho into an Underworld of women from earlier centuries when typhus, cholera, croup and diphtheria ravaged the alleys of old Europe. These are the pains of human experience before antibiotics. Returning to her own life, she reflects:

If she will not bless the ordinary,

if she will not sanctify the common,

then here I am and here I stay and then am I

the most miserable of women.

In fact it is ordinary detail that gives life to her poetry: a drawer eased by candle grease, or car keys 'getting warmer in one hand'. She describes what she sees wonderfully - air is 'tea-coloured in the garden' - and what she hears: 'plum coloured water / in the sloppy quiet'. In her most recent book, she rests her vision of love in daily life:

I would have said

we learned by heart

the coded marriage makes of passion.