Eavan Boland's 1995 volume of poetry, In a Time of Violence, explores her imaginative re-creations of history. The middle section of that volume, “Legends,” contains a remarkable poem entitled “Lava Cameo,” which depicts a moment when her grandmother met her grandfather disembarking in Cork. A close reading of this poem illustrates how its subject, tone, sentence structure, and diction enable Boland to imagine this scene, sympathetically write herself into it, and establish a new relationship with her grandparents and her own personal history.

In “Lava Cameo,” the opening essay of her memoir, Object Lessons, Boland relates her inspiration for her poem:

I found an emblem for her [Boland's grandmother, the subject of the essay] before I even realized I would find it difficult to name her life. Or my own. It happened one Sunday afternoon when I was married with young children. I went to an antiques fair […] in a hotel in south Dublin […]. I wish now that I had looked closely at one item. I remember the dealer pointing and talking. This, she told me, was a lava cameo. An unusual brooch and once fashionable. Unlike the ordinary Victorian cameos, which were carved on shells, this one was cut into volcanic rock. The brooch was a small oval. The face was carved into stone the color of spoiled cream. I looked at it quickly and moved on.

(OL 32-33)

The information about the brooch is reduced to a parenthetical phrase preceding the poem, almost as if to downplay its importance for Boland: “(A brooch carved on volcanic rock)” (Collected Poems 195). This aside establishes the poem's musing tone. Boland languidly remarks in the first line: “I like this story.” She further qualifies her tale in the second stanza, noting,

except that it is not a story,
more a rumour or a folk memory,
something thrown out once in a random conversation;
a hint merely.

(5-8)

In her essay “Lava Cameo,” Boland describes the “hint” in some detail: “I left school when I was seventeen. A rainy summer intervened before I began my courses at Trinity College. Sometime during these months my mother showed me the only piece of paper—a letter from her father to her mother—in her possession” (OL 14). Boland recalls being struck by the intimacy and yearning in the letter, as well as by her grandfather's anxious tone and fear of the future. Another detail about her grandparents' marriage, repeated to her by her mother, has also colored her view of their relationship: “Whenever my grandfather's ship docked, often at Cork Harbour, Mary Ann would go and meet him. She did this because she feared the women at the ports” (OL 16).

One of these meetings between her grandparents is the subject of Boland's poem “Lava Cameo.” In lines 2 through 4, she quickly sketches in the details:

My grandfather was a sea-captain.
My grandmother always met him when his ship docked.
She feared the women at the ports—

(2-4)

In her essay “Lava Cameo,” she laments the fact that her grandmother died alone in a maternity hospital in Dublin. She turns to musing upon her own imagined relationship to her grandmother and then, swiftly, to her own struggles as a woman and a poet. The poem follows this same general pattern.

Two conditional clauses enforce the relaxed opening tone, but they also prepare the reader for a conclusion of more force, which follows in line 16. The first conditional clause adheres to an opening common in logical reasoning and is typical of Boland's remarkable evocation of feminine apparel:

If I say wool and lace for her skirt and
crepe for her blouse
in the neck of which is pinned a cameo.
carved out of black volcanic rock;

(9-12)

In these lines she is literally dressing up the memory of her grandmother. After this conditional comes the second:

if I make her pace the Cork docks, stopping
to take down her parasol as a gust catches
the silk tassels of it—

(13-15)

Boland adds motion to her memory in these lines, infusing it with a dream-like, near-ethereal quality.

These two conditionals and the conversational tone of the speaker, however, are swiftly answered with the entrance of a new, academic voice, which adds, “then consider this:” (196). This line is both a quasi conclusion to the previous section and the beginning of a proposal about history that Boland the academic poses to herself and her audience:

there is a way of making free with the past,
a pastiche of what is
real and what is
not, which can only be
justified if you think of it
not as sculpture but syntax:
a structure extrinsic to meaning which uncovers
the inner secret of it.

(17-24)

Her own construction of history as justified by “syntax” is echoed by her diction in these lines: Words such as “pastiche” and the Latinate word “extrinsic” reflect the distantiation of Boland the academic poet from her family history. Her evocation of history as a syntactical construction runs counter to the claims of postmodernism: She is not claiming that history or meaning do not exist but that their recovery is fraught with difficulty.

This detached tone is broken by two lines of declarative sentences in which Boland relates what she does know: “She will die at thirty-one in a fever ward. / He will drown nine years later in the Bay of Biscay” (25-26). What follows constitutes a final break in the poem and is another device typical of Boland: She inserts herself into the poem, and as she does so, the distinctions between her grandmother and her poetic muse blur:

They will never even be
Sepia, and so I put down
The gangplank now between the ship and the ground.
In the story, late afternoon has become evening.
They kiss once, their hands touch briefly.
Please.
Look at me. I want to say to her; show me
The obduracy of an art which can
arrest a profile in the flux of hell.
Inscribe catastrophe.

(27-36)

In the absence of her grandparents, Boland builds a bridge to their past, inserting herself as “I” into the poem and seemingly pleading with her grandmother to look at her. The evocative, near-keening quality of “Please” is emphasized by its placement as a separate line and by the full stop that follows it. She urges her grandmother to slow down the moment and fix it like the lava cameo that represents her. Additionally, she pleads with her grandmother to give her the ability to freeze moments like this with her poetry. The “profile” of the penultimate line refers to both the actual cameo drawing and the picture of her grandparents that the poet has developed. The final line also has a double meaning: it refers both to the actual construction of the lava cameo, something inscribed on a product of catastrophe—a volcano—and to Boland's own inscription of the catastrophe looming over her grandparents' heads.

In the essay “Lava Cameo,” Boland relates her growing fixation with the cameo: “The more I thought about it, the more the lava cameo seemed an emblem of something desperate. If it was a witticism in the face of terror, if it made an ornament of it, what else was memory? Yet in the end, in my need to make a construct of that past, it came down to a simple fact. I had no choice” (OL 34). Her absorption with the cameo illustrates her own need to write a history upon the flux of her family's past, one that she was largely locked out of. It typifies Boland's poetry, representing both her search for her feminine, Irish past and her attempts to insert herself into that past through poetry.

Works Cited

Boland, Eavan. “Lava Cameo.” Collected Poems. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1995.

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