… 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.

—Boland, ITV 7-8

Eavan Boland's most recent volume of poems, In a Time of Violence (1994), and her collection of essays, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995), extend her preoccupation with woman's place in Irish life and in the landscape of Irish writing. Indeed, many of the concerns that characterize Boland's new work emanate from the central questions in her earliest attempts to theorize the gender politics of Irish literature: How does a locality influence an individual writer? What is the relationship of woman to nation in Ireland? What is the place of women's writing in Irish literary history?

Clearly, Boland had already responded to such questions in her poetry. Even a poem like “An Old Steel Engraving,” from her volume Outside History (1990), can be read as an oblique commentary on women's “place” in a larger historical and cultural picture. In mapping history—both general and literary—as landscape, she laments that

we have found
the country of our malediction where
nothing can move until we find the word,
nothing can stir until we say this is
what happened and is happening and history
is one of us who turns away
while the other is
turning the page.

(OH 45)

The past, Boland suggests, is as fixed as a steel engraving unless the poet can “find the word” that will make the “unfinished action” of the picture “widen to include us,” to include those unrepresented in the tableau, those who remain “outside history.”

Indeed, “Outside History,” the title poem of the title sequence of that collection, confirms the political correction toward which Boland—writing self-consciously as an Irish woman—strives: “I have chosen: / Out of myth into history I move to be / part of that ordeal” (OH 50). Her recent poetry, such as the first poem in her new collection (quoted in the epigraph), continues to reconsider Ireland's topography—both literal and poetic. The speaker announces at the outset: “That the science of cartography is limited / … Is what I wish to prove” (ITV 7). And while she seeks to re-sketch the actual famine roads, all but obliterated by time and memory, those obscure paths can also be read as analogues for other kinds of erasure and that historical great hunger for other unrecorded desires.¹

By investigating links between poetry and place, Boland's prose, now collected in Object Lessons, explores similar ground to that charted by Seamus Heaney in his 1987 talks for the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, printed in 1989 in a volume called The Place of Writing. In these essays, Heaney expands his long-standing interest in place to discuss not only how the writer “becomes a voice of the spirit of the region” (20), but also how the poet both writes place into existence and then unwrites it. Additionally, he considers not only a writer's relationship to a specific locality—such as Yeats's to his imaginatively creative (and created) Thoor Ballylee—but also a writer's awareness of the place of poetry in his specific literary tradition and political milieu. Revisiting poets' places, tracing lines of influence, demarcating the terrain of contemporary Irish poetry—in short, mapping his territory with the sureness of an experienced cartographer—Heaney uses only male poets as landmarks. As if in response, Boland moves backward in a more cautious pursuit—recovering the places of the dispossessed, reading the blank pages of history, staking out the borderlands.

Indeed, Boland's prose provides a subtle revision of the literary geography set forth by Heaney. Heaney's second lecture in The Place of Writing investigates (among other issues) both how poetry is related to political debate and what “status we are to assign to such symbolic utterance within the historical circumstances where we live our lives” (PW 36). Although Heaney acknowledges that art may be “a means to redress or affront public and historical conditions”—a topic he expands considerably in his Oxford lectures, published as The Redress of Poetry (1995)—here he confines his political questions to the context of the British/Irish troubles, cautioning against “poetry as a self-conscious function of the national culture” and yet celebrating those contemporary poets who are “resourceful in changing the demands and pointing to a new agenda for Irish poetry.”² He appears as the “objective” narrator, the contemporary literary historian, the mapmaker.

Boland's prose, however, exposes a different “vexed question” in Irish political debate, a question that falls outside Heaney's circumscribed territory of interest: the place of women in Irish culture. In two essays in particular, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (first published as a LIP pamphlet in Ireland and republished as “Outside History” in The American Poetry Review and in Object Lessons) and “The Woman The Place The Poet” (first published in 1990 in The Georgia Review) Boland takes up these “other troubles” with a perspective quite different from Heaney's. She is the implicated narrator—part sojourner, part sleuth—scrutinizing literary history and reading the map to reveal a topography of displacement.

Because he belongs to a poetic tradition that so easily links poetic vision and national identity, Heaney is in a position to criticize the dangers of such connections. Citing a range of possible misuses of nationalism—from the local “campaign of violence mounted in the name of Ireland by the provisional IRA” (PW 37) to the more far-reaching and repugnant “stain of Nazi ideology and Aryan racism” (PW 42)—Heaney explains that “even to canvas the idea of a connection between a founded nation and a founded poetic voice is in danger of being judged old-fashioned, if not downright retrograde” (PW 39). Nevertheless, Heaney himself admits that the old questions about the relationship of the poet to the idea of a nation can be refigured, though poets are required to address them “in an imaginatively rewarding way” (PW 43). However, Boland, exiled from the very tradition that Heaney is able to contextualize, attempts to recover or to reconstruct exactly that connection that Heaney renders suspect: to “repossess” her nation from a hollow rhetoric that makes her, as a woman, “an outsider in my own national literature, cut off from its archive, at a distance from its energy” (OL 128).

Tracing in Irish poetry “the tendency to fuse the national and the feminine, to make the image of the woman the pretext of a romantic nationalism” (OL 151), Boland explores the difficulty of forging identity and “ethical direction” for women who “have moved from being the objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them” (OL 126).³ To some extent, women writers have been paralyzed by a tradition of imagery that, in Boland's words, created “an association of the feminine and the national—and the consequent simplification of both” (OL 135). Women have, in other words, been put in their place and kept there, and theirs has not been the “place of writing,” but rather the place of the written—the defined, the fixed, and the permanent.

Thus, Boland laments her displacement from that predominantly male tradition that Heaney comfortably finds a place in. Heaney's collection of essays explores, implicitly at least, the influence of two modern poets, Yeats and MacNeice, on a generation of contemporary poets, and he has little trouble finding glances toward those two figures in recent poetry by Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon. His own poetry, though rarely discussed in detail in his prose, also contributes to an ongoing dialogue with poets past and present, thus establishing a place in both filial and fraternal communities. Boland, in contrast, looks to literary history for continuity, but discovers no matrilineage. Indeed, even for sorority she must travel east to Anna Akhmatova or west to Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop, and a great deal of support for her argument comes, ironically, from male writers of other nations or from Irish writers like Padraic Colum, whose status as a “peasant poet” made him, too, into “a cipher of the national cause” (OL 140).

If Boland and Heaney have any common ground, it may be their shared interest in the idea of exile, a concept that both writers turn into a positive force. Heaney's second essay in The Place of Writing, “The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry” (an astonishing title for a chapter that discusses no women poets), proposes that “MacNeice provides an example of how distance, either of the actual, exilic, cross-channel variety or the imaginary, self-renewing, trans-historical and transcultural sort, can be used as an enabling factor in the work of art in Ulster” (PW 46). Boland's sense of exile is less voluntary, yet no less powerful in its effects: she never has to leave the country, or even to quarrel with it, to achieve her marginalized status.

Still, this marginality also confers “certain advantages” (OL 147) on the female outsider who, because “invisible,” is “able to move, with almost surreal inevitability, from being within the poem to being its maker” (OL 151). Boland explains that

A woman poet … is too deeply woven into the passive texture of that tradition, too intimate a part of its imagery to be allowed her freedom.

… I thought it vital that women poets such as myself should establish a discourse with the idea of a nation. I felt sure that the most effective way to do this was by subverting the previous terms of that discourse. Rather than accept the nation as it appeared in Irish poetry, with its queens and muses, I felt the time had come to rework those images by exploring the emblematic relationship between my own feminine experience and a national past.

(OL 148)

Thus, one might say that Heaney, to borrow a phrase from Hamlet, must “by indirection find direction out,” that is, must gain an aesthetic distance from both contemporary Ulster and Irish poetic history, in order to recognize his relationship to each, whereas Boland must “by indirection find direction in,” that is, gain entry into a poetic tradition from which she, like other women writers whom she represents, has been excluded. Yet their relationship does not end with this opposing movement. While Heaney is in no way immediately responsible for Boland's exiled position—in fact his poems do not, in general, make political stereotypes of female figures—he is at least incidentally responsible for perpetuating a tradition to which women writers have little or no access.⁴ In mapping new ground in his prose, he, like his literary forefathers, excludes women, displacing them anew.

Boland boldly responds to exclusion as she struggles to make her own experience representative and to embody in her work those disembodied and silenced women, “the real women of an actual past” (OL 153). A Kind of Scar, the original pamphlet version of the essay “Outside History,” borrows its title from “Mise Eire,” the second poem in Boland's 1986 collection, The Journey. Claiming in the poem's title that she too is “of Ireland,” she refuses to “go back to it,” that place with “the songs / that bandage up the history, / the words / that make a rhythm of the crime / where time is time past” (OH 78). Aligning herself with stereotypes of womanhood—the prostitute or the immigrant mother—she ultimately claims that “a new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before” (OH 79). Both her prose and her poetry elaborate the images of wounding and scarring, implying that the wound of exile, while it heals, leaves its mark on the injured party.

Yet in another sense, Boland also displays the desire to perpetrate the injury: to violate the terms of an exclusive literary tradition. In “Outside History,” a sequence of poetry in her 1990 collection, and in the essay “The Woman The Place The Poet” (which is to some extent a prose background to these poems), Boland moves beyond recording the hurt of women's historical exclusion to seizing the weapon—language—and wielding it to inflict pain. These works carve out a place in the canon for the woman writer in general and for Boland in particular; they assault the apparently intact body of Irish literary history and, if they do not leave it “split to the knob of its gullet” (to revise Synge's Christy Mahon), they certainly make incisions large enough to leave permanent scars.

In “The Woman The Place The Poet,” Boland's personal history becomes the vehicle for her reinvention of Irish history and for her insistence that the lost voices of history be recovered in the literary tradition. Tracing her ancestor who had been appointed master of the Irish workhouse at Clonmel, she becomes painfully aware of what has been excised from his history and hers—the fates of those multitudes of faceless, nameless victims of the workhouse. She conjures up one,

A woman like myself, with two small children, who must have come to this place as I came to the suburb. She would have come here in her twenties or thirties. But whereas my arrival in the suburb marked a homecoming, hers in the workhouse would have initiated a final and almost certainly fatal homelessness. At an age when I was observing the healings of place, she would have been a scholar of its violations.

(OL 163)

Boland's essay makes audible what for this woman remained silent, yet she also expands the significance of the woman's terrible sufferings: the essay laments not only the history of her losses but also, even more important, the loss of her history. Recognizing that “poets have been free to invoke place as a territory between invention and creation”—and admitting that she herself has taken such liberties—she insists that writers must also see place as “what it has been for so many: brute, choiceless fact” (OL 163). In this sense, she questions the comfort inherent in the supposedly restorative function of myth: “Is there something about the repeated action—about lifting a child, clearing a dish, watching the seasons return to a tree and depart from a vista—which reveals a deeper meaning to existence and heals some of the worst abrasions of time?” (OL 169).

While Boland is certain that her own life provides a contrast to the workhouse woman's experience, the reader understands that in literary history, Boland is threatened with the same displacement, silence, and disembodiment: she, too, could disappear without a trace, as many women writers already have.⁵ However, Boland's poetry, probing even deeper into the metaphors of wounding and scarring, intimates that a quick healing is not always desirable; indeed, she asks her own body to reflect (like her poetry) the history of defeated womanhood in Ireland. In “The Making of an Irish Goddess,” she mentions “the way I pin my hair to hide / the stitched, healed, blemish of a scar,” but by writing her poem, she opens another sore. Describing the famine facts of

the failed harvests,
the fields rotting to the horizon,
the children devoured by their mothers
whose souls, they would have said,
went straight to hell,
followed by their own,

Boland compares such experiences to her own life, to the safety of a March evening when she looks into the suburban neighborhood distance for her own daughter. She claims that “Myth is the wound we leave / in the time we have” (OH 38-39) and thus reinflicts the pain of the past on the reader's present life as she invokes the spirits of the buried mothers and children of famine (“The Making of an Irish Goddess”), the figures of myth transformed into landscape (“Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God”), the exiled German au pair girls of her childhood (“In Exile”), her own mother and grandmother (“What We Lost”): the dead.

Further, when her poems stop short of clarifying the role of the dead, her prose elaborates. In imagination, she can become these past lives; she can become not her ancestor, whose history is at least partially recorded, but the workhouse woman whose past has been erased. She can take that woman's place. For while Boland acknowledges that in real life such surrogacy is impossible, “yet even as a figment this woman was important”:

She cast her shadow across the suburb. She made me doubt the pastoral renewals of day-to-day life. And whenever I tried to find the quick meanings of my day in the deeper ones of the past, she interposed a fierce presence in case the transaction should be too comfortable, too lyric.

(OL 171)

Boland continually rejects that comfort; she refuses to hide the wound. In her poem “In Exile,” she hears again the hurt of the German au pair girls' voices “forty years on and far from where / I heard it first.” She identifies with that painful “music” from her own exiled position in a “New England town at the start of winter” and insists “my speech will not heal. I do not want it to heal” (OH 46).

Ultimately re-mapping Heaney's “exclusive” landscape, then, Boland, in both her prose and her poetry, begins to record women's history and to renovate Irish poetic tradition by giving a written place to her personal and personalized experience. Indeed, contrary to Edna Longley's assertion that Boland must still adopt a more critical perspective on the idea of Ireland—a perspective that would emphasize “the extent to which the North has destabilised the ‘nation’” and which would question “unitary assumptions about ‘a society, a nation, a literary heritage’ [Boland's own terms]” (16)—Boland's prose writings have long revealed a sensitivity to the complex nature of Irish culture. Failing to acknowledge that Boland's A Kind of Scar even moves in the right direction, Longley complains that

Boland's new Muse, supposedly based on the varied historical experience of Irish women, looks remarkably like the Sean Bhean Bhocht. Her pamphlet begins by invoking an old Achill woman who speaks of the Famine. The “real women of an actual past” are subsumed into a single emblematic victim-figure: “the women of a long struggle and a terrible survival,” “the wrath and grief of Irish history.”

(17)

As early as 1974, however, Boland recognized that Irish writers must “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” (“Weasel's Tooth”). Here, Boland actually seems to anticipate one of Longley's models for Irish people's own “salvation”—the model borrowed from women's groups. Longley suggests a celebration of the “web” of relationships among Irish people, which Boland has also supported:

The image of the web is female, feminist, “connective” as contrasted with male polarisation. So is the ability to inhabit a range of relations rather than a single allegiance. The term “identity” has been coarsened in Ulster politics to signify two ideological package-deals immemorially in offer. To admit to more varied, mixed, fluid and relational kinds of identity would advance nobody's territorial claim. It would undermine cultural defenses.

(Longley 23)

In fact, at the same time that Longley's pamphlet was published, Boland's “The Woman The Place The Poet” and Outside History appeared, testifying to Boland's many different cultural identifications.

Moreover, if Boland's writing through 1990 seems to have searched primarily in the past for its relationships, a more recent interview indicates that her current thoughts are quite aligned with Longley's. Criticizing a narrowly nationalist conception of “united Ireland,” Boland reminds her readers that

Irish nationhood—for more than a century—has been a constellation of tensions and fragmentations. If we want that nation then we have to respect the different cultures within it. As poets and writers we ought to understand those cultures.

(Consalvo 96)

Clearly, she has no simplistic conception of an Irish culture, and her latest writing attempts to explore not only her sense of personal and national history, but also the voices still unheard in contemporary Irish life and letters.

Boland urges women to bond together in their shared exile. Unlike Heaney's picture of a self-willed and stoic isolation that feeds the genius of his male contemporaries, Boland's portrait of female marginalization is unwilled, but potentially powerfully communal. Whereas Heaney argues both “that the poetic imagination in its strongest manifestation imposes its vision upon place rather than accepts a vision from it” and “that this visionary imposition is never exempt from the imagination's antithetical ability to subvert its own creation” (PW 20)—thus making the poet the ultimately powerful individual seer—Boland instead exposes how much historical “unwriting” and rewriting must be done before women can discover and trust their own visions and their own voices. Boland personally desires to “compel … some recognitions” from the predominantly male “authoritarian literary community” (Consalvo 97), and she seems to hope that Irish women writers will collectively rechart the literary maps that have been consigned to them.

Heaney's recent prose, whether in response to Boland or not, has, in fact, validated feminist claims for some territorial rights. In his most recent volume of essays, The Redress of Poetry, he directly acknowledges both the need to reconsider the writer's “place” and the complications attending any political “redress”:

Writers have to start out as readers, and before they put pen to paper, even the most disaffected of them will have internalized the norms and forms of the tradition from which they wish to secede. Whether they are feminists rebelling against the patriarchy of language or nativists in full cry with the local accents of their vernacular … [t]hey will have been predisposed to accommodate themselves to the consciousness which subjugated them.

(RP 6-7)

Such a comment is clearly grounded in an affirmation of the liberating possibilities of poetry itself or in a humanist desire for inclusiveness—for “a new commonwealth of art, one wrested out of the old dramas of conquest and liberation, of annexation and independence” (RP 201). Boland cannot yet dream of that commonwealth. She is too much aware, as she puts it, of “the distance between my own life, my lived experience, and conventional interpretations of both poetry and the poet's life. … It was that being a woman, I had entered into a life for which poetry has no name” (OL 18). For Boland, then, “naming” compels recognition, and she underscores that we must mark differences before we can erase them with commonalties.

All the essays in Boland's Object Lessons trace the personal implications of being a woman and a poet in contemporary Ireland. Boland asserts that these reflections are constructed “as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings” (xiii). Heaney, too, has certain “preoccupations” that shape his prose works. However, Heaney's recent work begins to show a change, as if his poetic decision, in Seeing Things, to “credit marvels”—extended in his Nobel lecture to “crediting poetry”—has allowed him to consider with generosity perspectives he had never fully taken into account. Heaney's narrative of the place of poetry—especially of Irish poetry—has suffered from omissions, but Boland's has languished in repetitions. Object Lessons recounts the same story too many times, ultimately flattening out the map Boland wants to show in sharp relief.

Nevertheless, it is a story that needs telling, and without definitively speaking for women with experiences other than her own, Boland has at least put a new territory on the literary map: women's exclusion and its representative images of wounding and scarring. She has made the picture “widen to include us.” In seeking to embody the homeless, placeless women of history—to give voice to their real sufferings—she must open old wounds; she must stall the healing; she must point to the scars. She must refuse to “[turn] away / while the other is / turning the page” (OH 45). She must expose the limits of cartography by pointing to the map and re-marking the famine roads.

Notes

1. A famine road is a literal “trace” of the starving nineteenth-century Irish who were given make-work jobs building roads. Where the workers died, the roads end; they are literally dead ends.

2. Heaney appears to have recognized the social responsibility of the poet in The Place of Writing:

   All of these [poets from different subjugated countries] have been caught at a crossroads where the essentially aesthetic demand of their vocation encountered the different demand that their work participate in a general debate which preoccupies their societies. The topic of this debate typically concerns the political rights and cultural loyalties of different social or racial groups resulting from separate heritages, affronts and identities; and even if individual poets have been spared direct pressure to address those concerns in their work, they would need to have been insensitive in a disqualifying way not to feel the prevalent expectation—if only as an anxiety about their creative purposes.

   (PW 36-37)

   Yet, as the best-known poet and perhaps the best-known literary essayist in Ireland today, Heaney has not yet displayed much interest in those female writers who attempt to express women's experience or to critique the patriarchal structure of language.

3. For a discussion of Boland's sense of “poetic ethics,” see Hagen and Zelman, who look at Boland's earlier work in light of her sense of exile.

4. In his silence about women poets' accomplishments, Heaney is in the company of many contemporary critics and anthologists. The noisy controversy over the exclusion of many women writers (and Irish-language writers) from The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing merely underscores a tradition of such omissions. Robert Garratt's Modern Irish Poetry (1989), for example, purports to trace “tradition and continuity from Yeats to Heaney,” but his book gives no space to women poets, even in his chapter on “The Tradition of Discontinuity.” In addition, Dillon Johnston, who quite unabashedly titles the first chapter of his 1985 Irish Poetry after Joyce “The Irish Poet and His Society” (my emphasis), gives a scant three pages to the “three younger women poets”—Boland, McGuckian, and Ní Chuilleanáin—whom he finds “invite serious attention.” Indeed, his remarks about these are, at best, cursory. Several anthologists, too, seem to discount women poets: Anthony Bradley's “new and revised” edition of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1988) finds room for only five women among forty-nine contributors; Fallon and Mahon's The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990) includes only four women of thirty-five poets represented; Paul Muldoon's The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1989) places only Medbh McGuckian among the ten poets who constitute his curiously narrow pantheon; and Thomas Kinsella's The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1989) names no women in its section on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ostensibly inclusive in their representation of relatively unknown male writers, each of these volumes excludes female writers of at least equal merit.

5. Recently, several individual anthologists and publishing projects have begun to discover some “lost” women writers as well as “lost” texts by even writers who are well known. A. A. Kelly's Pillars of the House (1987), though perhaps suffering from inclusion of an overabundance of poets at the expense of truly introducing any of them, displays a long-standing tradition of women's poetry in Ireland that has been unacknowledged in most anthologies. In fiction, Pandora Press's Mothers of the Novel series has made available novels long out of print, such as Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. Feminist presses like Attic Press have also made a major contribution to the ongoing, if somewhat marginalized, dialogue about women's issues.

Works Cited

Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

———. A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition. Dublin: Attic, 1989.

———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.

———. Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

———. “The Weasel's Tooth.” Irish Times June 7, 1974: 7.

———. “The Woman The Place The Poet.” Georgia Review 44 (1990): 97-109.

Bradley, Anthony, ed. Contemporary Irish Poetry. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988.

Consalvo, Deborah McWilliams. “An Interview with Eavan Boland.” Studies 81 (1992): 89-100.

Deane, Seamus. ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Derry, Northern Ireland: Field Day, 1991.

Fallon, Peter, and Derek Mahon, eds. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. London: Penguin, 1990.

Garratt, Robert F. Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989.

Hagen, Patricia, and Thomas W. Zelman. “‘We Were Never on the Scene of the Crime’: Eavan Boland's Repossession of History.” Twentieth Century Literature 37 (1991): 442-53.

Heaney, Seamus. Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996.

———. The Place of Writing. Athens, Ga.: Scholars, 1989.

———. The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.

———. Seeing Things. London: Faber, 1991.

Johnston, Dillon. Irish Poetry after Joyce. Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1985.

Kelly, A. A., ed. Pillars of the House: An Anthology of Verse by Irish Women from 1690 to the Present. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1987.

Kinsella, Thomas, ed. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Longley, Edna. From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands. Dublin: Attic, 1990.

Muldoon, Paul, ed. The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. London: Faber, 1989.