As will be evident to anyone who has followed Eavan Boland's purgatorial journey into self-placement, the story of her meeting with the Achill woman occurs at least twice in her published work: once in the verse sequence of Outside History (Carcanet, 1990), and again as a prologue to her essay of the same title (P.N.R. 75). Boland, then a student at Trinity College, had borrowed a friend's cottage on Achill Island for a week at Easter, bringing with her, for study, a volume of the Court poets of the Silver Age, ‘those 16th century song-writers like Wyatt and Raleigh, whose lines appear so elegant … yet whose poems smell of the gallows’. Since the cottage was without water, an old woman carried it up every evening in a bucket.

I remember the cold rosiness of her hands.
She bent down and blew on them like broth.
And round her waist, on a white background,
in coarse, woven letters, the words ‘glass cloth’.
And she was nearly finished for the day.
And I was all talk, raw from college— …

Both poem and essay mark the occasion as an epiphany, an incident that affected the direction of the poet's life and thinking. ‘She was the first person to talk to me about the famine. The first person, in fact, to speak to me with any force about the terrible parish of survival and death which the event had been in those regions.’ When the young poet turned her back on the woman and re-entered the cottage to light a fire and memorize lines from the Court Poets, she was ignorantly turning, she says, away from her own history, away from the Achill woman and what she represented of Ireland's past in order ‘to commit to memory the songs and artifices of the very power system which had made [the old woman's] own memory such an archive of loss’.

In her poetry, Eavan Boland raises the problem of her Irish identity in the context of that ‘archive of loss’. At the same time, her concerns are much broader. Memory, change, loss, the irrecoverable past—such are the shared conditions of humankind with which she scrupulously engages. Her poems give an impression of a grave, even solemn intelligence, very little ruffled by the politics of nationalism, or, for that matter, of the women's movement. A sensitive poet, then, a poet unafraid of thought, rarely thrown off balance by anger; a poet willing to brave current fashions by freely advancing ideas—though she works, usually, with concrete images. Daringly, she calls a poem ‘We are Human History. We are not Natural History’, placing her children in a ‘short-lived’ and ‘elegiac’ light of a particular encounter with nature (a wild bees nest) so as to explore, in tentative yet exact language, her sense of the uniquely human experience of time, which is selective memory. ‘And this— / this I thought, is how it will have been / chosen from those summer evenings / which under the leaves of the poplars— / striped dun and ochre, simmering over / the stashed-up debris of old seasons— / a swarm of wild bees is making use of.’ (My italics).

Given the distinction Boland makes between human history and the natural world, one might expect an essay entitled ‘Outside History’ to point to an area of release. Human history, seen as a record of power struggle, war and wastage, is indeed a horror story; the whole of it (and natural history, too) could be described as ‘a parish of survival and death’. But to see around ‘history’ into the filtering byways of individual creation and discovery can liberate the mind from useless self-laceration. I opened the essay, ‘Outside History’, with an expectation, founded on the poems, of engaging with a personal philosophy of survival. To my surprise, the essay, though very personal, turned out to be a polemic: a disquisition on the ‘virulence and necessity of the idea of a nation’, and especially on how the poetic inheritance of Ireland has cut across the poet's identity as a woman.

Though Eavan Boland as an Irishwoman and I as an American are separated by very different historical experiences, the undergraduate encounter with the Achill woman is easy enough to share. The title ‘Outside History’ perhaps points to that silent majority excluded from the history books whom the practitioners of ‘total history’ have sought to bring inside history (as, for example, with Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost). For most of us probably, who seek to identify with the past but who feel excluded by gender or class or much else from the conventional national pasts of the history books, it is through these silent majorities that we must make our connections. Yet, is it only my American background that makes me pause before the ‘virulence and necessity of the idea of a nation’? For a Serbian or Croatian poet entering new nightmares after the long Ottoman centuries the language fits well enough. But for an Irish poet in a republic secure in the Economic Community, whose changing mood is now reflected in the election of a woman president? I'm not sure.

History, perhaps, should also be brought to bear on Boland's central premise: ‘that over a relatively short time—certainly no more than a generation or so—women have moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them.’ That almost all the Irish poets of the modern period have been male, and that women, by and large, have been motifs in their love poems and songs—yes, that no one could deny. Forget for a moment Yeats's complicated admiration for powerful political women: Maude Gonne, Constance Markowitz, Lady Gregory. Forget Joyce's warm and ebullient Molly Bloom (surely the character most likely to survive in Ulysses) and turn instead to the contents page of John Montague's Faber Book of Irish Verse (1978). Chronologically, after Thomas Moore (1779-1852) only two women's names appear: Eavan Boland herself, with one poem, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, with two. The list might well be extended to include Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh Mc Guckian; perhaps to one or two others. Still, that shows a proportion of, say, six women to over sixty men. The anxieties, the bafflements, the evident distress Eavan Boland experienced, given her contemporary social conscience and highly developed self-consciousness, look to be real enough.

I still recall my fury, one evening during the 1970s, after Montague himself, with James Simmons, had performed in the Old Fire Station, Oxford. Over drinks, insulted to be treated as an object of gallantry rather than a poet in my own right, I spoke rather hotly, I believe, to John Montague on the subject of women poets. Why could not (male) Irish poets take us seriously? Montague, to my surprise, laughed at my ignorance, maintaining that, on the contrary, women poets had never been discriminated against in Ireland. Many of the greatest poets in Irish had been women. I disbelieved him.

Many years later I came across a copy of The Faber Book of Irish Verse that John Montague must have been editing at that time. The introduction, dwelling on the oral tradition of early Irish literature, has a good deal to say about the loss, to Anglicized Irish poets, of their national language. The rediscovery of ancient Irish literature was spurred on by the Celtic revival of Yeats's time, a movement which continues into the present. Most Irish poets, at some time in their lives, turn their talents to translating from the ancient Irish epics. Pagan classics like The Great Tain and Cúchulain survived, ironically enough, in the monasteries. One paragraph in Montague's introduction struck me forcibly.

And here we should remark another aspect of early Irish poetry: it is the only literature in Europe, and perhaps in the world, where one finds a succession of women poets. Psychologically, a female poet has always seemed an absurdity, because of the necessarily intense relationship between the poet and the Muse. [I doubt that Montague would risk such a chauvinist speculation today.] Why then did poetry always seem a natural mode of expression for gifted Irish women? I think this was because there was no discrimination against them; the first woman poet of whom we hear, Liadan of Corcaguiney, was a fully-qualified member of the poets' guild, which could mean as much as twelve years of study. It was as an equal that the poet Cuirithir wooed her, and though she drove him off, for religious reasons, her lament rings in our ears to this day.

A section of Montague's anthology is devoted to Women and Love in the 9th century—much of it love poetry written by women, passionately to their men. The women's verse Montague represents in translation includes a famous prototype of Villon's ‘Belle Heaulmière’ called ‘The Hag of Bere’, Liadan's ‘Lament for Cuirithir’, and, from the 18th century, Eibhlin Dubh O'Connell's ‘Lament for Art O'Leary’—the culmination, Montague writes, of ‘a long line of such poems’.