SOURCE: "Framed in Words," in Kenyon Review, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Summer, 1991, pp. 169-81.

[In the following excerpt, Baker discusses Boland's "double stance" toward traditional Irish poetry.]

Eavan Boland is only five years younger than Seamus Heaney, and she is the author of six previous books of poetry, but Outside History 1980–1990 is her first collection to be widely distributed in this country. Ontario Review Press did publish its Introduction to Eavan Boland in 1981, and Carcanet distributed here, modestly, her 1987 The Journey. Still, while she clearly has not sprung overnight fully formed and brilliant, this collection may suggest so to an American audience. She is a splendid, graceful, demanding poet who has been evolving for some time, having published her first book, New Territory, in 1967.

I have been interested in showing how [Louis] MacNeice positioned himself outside the literal framework of Ireland and how Heaney situates himself at least partially outside, or apart from, the tradition of the Irish pastoral. Boland derives much of her considerable power from a similar strategy, locating herself outside of history, as her title stipulates. More specifically, she pursues an important, feminist revision of the history-making so often praised or inherited by MacNeice and Heaney. Not so much outside of history as counter to it, or in the process of amending it through addition, Boland has developed in her poetry what Harold Bloom might call an agonistic relationship with the paternal, natural, and often silencing history of traditional Irish poetry.

Recall, in reading the whole of Boland's "Bright-Cut Irish Silver," the lineage specified in Heaney's "Digging":

     I take it down
     from time to time, to feel
     the smooth path of silver meet the cicatrix 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,
 
     into my hands.

The scars earned in "Digging," by the passing down of male power and responsibility, are learned in Boland's poem—that is, gleaned as well as learned. In other words, what she inherits is a reminder or artifact of the male imagination dominant in the making of history and poetry. The male "gift" is a wounding one, a turning of the earth into scars, as well as a subtly misogynistic impulse to injure the female figure "inferred" onto the earth; recall, for instance, the fertile if impossible bog queen, and the violent act performed on her by the turfcutters and by history itself. Heaney's men loved the "cool hardness" in their hands as they performed their desires on the earth or on the page, but Boland finds such manipulation to be "cold," an oxymoronic potency at best—and in inheritance that she "takes down" only occasionally as a reminder of her own difference and obligation.

The image of a cicatrix—a healed scar, specifically of a tree—provides Boland with a complex figure for the revising of poetic history. In "Mise Eire," as she swears not to "go back to … my nation displaced / into old dactyls," she realizes again that her "roots are brutal." The brevity of her lineation suggests a clear-minded, resolute intent to confront

     the scalded memory,
     the songs
     that bandage up the history,
     the words
     that make a rhythm
     of the crime.

Here the speaker performs an act of sympathy and synthesis, imagining herself into the voice of a previously silenced persona:

     I am the woman
     in the gansy-coat
     on board the Mary Belle
     in the huddling cold,
 
     holding her half-dead baby to her.

Having identified and called into question the patriarchal character of history, Boland now seeks to replace that "criminal" paradigm with another model, maternal, uprooted, immigrant. It is most important that the female figure also possesses the skill of language—not the "old dactyls" of her antique nation, but rather

     a new language
     [which] is a kind of scar
     and heals after a while
     into a passable imitation
     of what went before.

Language frames or marks the location of the wound and, it provides as well the element which authorizes the wound to begin to heal.

To identify and name a problem is to make such a beginning. Boland's overall poetic involves an even more thorough transumption, and many of her strongest poems take up the challenge of containing the past while revising it into relevance. To amend the traditional estate of women in poetry, Boland locates her women in their more probable situations—not unreal nymphs or muses, but working, dignified, if domestically bound women. It's not that Boland wishes an exclusively domestic occupation for women, but that such an occupation (instead of membership in a male myth-wish) is their more likely accurate history. "The Women" presents a landscape and a vocation more like Dickinson's than Heaney's:

    This is the hour I love: the in-between
    neither here nor there hour of evening.
    The air is tea-colored in the garden.
    The briar rose is spilled crepe de Chine.
 
    This is the time I do my work best,
    going up the stairs in two minds,
    in two worlds, carrying cloth or glass,
    leaving something behind, bringing
    something with me I should have left behind.

The poet at work deals with a reluctantly inherited past and with the homely materials at hand, stitching them together. At the doubled crossroad—of night and day, and of the past and present—she witnesses in her lines a remarkable metamorphosis:

    in the words I choose, the lines I write,
    they rise like visions and appear to me:
 
    women of work, of leisure, of the night,
    in stove-colored silks, in lace, in nothing,
    with crewel needles, with books, with wide-open legs
 
    who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing,
    who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips
    and fell and grieved and healed into myth,
 
    into me in the evening at my desk….

This is a "vision" of the history of women heretofore "outside" poetic history. So that "my sister will be wiser," as she writes in another poem, "Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark," she exposes a past vulnerability toward the mythmaker, the "god pursuing":

    Look at me.
    I can be cooking,
    making coffee,
 
    scrubbing wood, perhaps,
    and back it comes:
    the crystalline, the otherwhere,
    the wood
 
    where I was
    when he began the chance.
    And how I ran from him!
 
    Pan-thighed,
    satyr-faced he was.

Boland repudiates the role of victim-shepherdess within the mythology of male history-making. Or, rather, she recognizes the role her gender has played in that mythology and refuses to frame herself there any longer. In "The New Pastoral," Boland explores the possible hazards of cutting loose from such a pervasive system:

     I am a lost, last inhabitant—
     displaced person in a pastoral chaos.
 
     All day I listen to the loud distress, the switch
     and tick of new herds.

But her speaker reasserts that she's "no shepherdess," and turns instead toward the actual circumstances of women's lives. Even within the contemporary domestic scenery, Boland senses a possible, familiar (and familial) entrapment:

    am I
    at these altars,
    warm shrines—
    washing machines, dryers
 
    with their incense
    of men and infants—
    priestess
    or sacrifice?

The answer, here in "Domestic Interior," depends on her ability to transform her circumstances past and present into art, into a schema of imagery appropriate to her own sense of self, and finally into an identity she chooses within and beyond the poetic tradition:

    The woman is as round
    as the new ring
    ambering her finger.
    The mirror weds her….
 
    But there's a way of life
    that is its own witness:
    put the kettle on, shut the blind.
    Home is a sleeping child,
    an open mind
 
    and our effects,
    shrugged and settled
    in the sort of light
    jugs and kettles
    grow important by.

Boland seeks to describe a poetic location, and "effect"—that is, a property as well as a force—which includes an indicated past and a possibly ensnaring present. What prevents the continuation of oppression is the voice of the woman as she elects the substance of her own history and the manner of her own presentation. Even from within her daily surroundings, or perhaps especially within such, she finds an alternative to the unreal myth of her fathers:

     There is
     about it all
     a quiet search for attention,
     like the unexpected shine
     of a despised utensil.

Eavan Boland is an attentive, powerful, encouraging poet. Part of her power derives from her ability to confront a past which might otherwise force her into complicity or silence. That dubious inheritance includes, in part, Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney. But there may be an equally remarkable kinship between her work and theirs: the consistent antagonism of modern Irish poets with their past. Each of these poets very carefully and purposefully situates him or herself outside a large and traditional notion; most significantly, the stance of a chosen exclusion allows each poet to maneuver more freely within the conventions held in question. For MacNeice, exile provided him the freedom to retrieve his Irish birthright within the frame of his memory and art. Heaney questions the pastoral ideal to reinvigorate it, modernize it, even politicize it. Boland subverts the male ideal of history even while she instigates a parallel history—feminist and alternate—to witness the "unexpected shine" of otherwise mundane, mythologized, or suppressed lives. Due in part to their skeptical, doubled stances toward their respective subjects, these poets express a deep and intelligent love for something related to, but clearly not the same as, what they hold in doubt.