SOURCE: "Mad Ireland Hurts Her Too," in Nation, June 6, 1994, pp. 798-802.

[In the following review, Castro states that "the real beauty of reading the poems [in In a Time of Violence] lies in discovering the difficulty in each and the delicacy with which Boland dismantles icons associated with Irish tradition and culture."]

In a Time of Violence, Eavan Boland's seventh poetry book, held third place on the Irish Times best-seller list in mid-April, in the "non-fiction" paperback category. Although it was replaced a week later by Darina Allen's Simply Delicious: Versatile Vegetables, it is significant that a poetry collection should join other top-selling, socially conscious books in Ireland: Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List, Zlata Filipovic's diary and Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The serendipitous upsurge for poetry seemed tied to Boland's appearance on the leading TV late show and her headliner status in the A. T. Cross Cúirt Festival of Literature in Galway, which also featured Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and American poets Denise Levertov and C. K. Williams.

Women poets in Ireland—or England or the United States—rarely achieve this level of commercial and critical success. For her part, Boland argues that in the past twenty years, Irish women have advanced from being anonymous mute witnesses in the belly of a male-created "mother" Ireland to being authors of literature. As she told interviewer Jody Allen-Randolph last year,

the woman poet is an emblematic figure in poetry now in the same way that the Romantic and the Modernist poets once were…. [They] were emblematic not because they were awkward, or daring, or disruptive. But because the projects they set themselves—the way they approached poetry itself—internalized the stresses and truths of poetry at that moment in time. This is just what the woman poet does. This is her importance to the critique, outside the worth of any individual poems.

In a Time of Violence follows Outside History, a volume of selected poems, in its keen-edged deliberations about war, art and Irish, especially female, identities. To the first-time reader of Boland, this slim volume may appear easy to canvass. Even in the ominous title, the language is lilting, springy and not bookish. The poems, like gift boxes, tend to be filled with ironic yet delighting things—flowers, a party dress and a heather hillscape near the river Liffey inform images particularizing Irish famines, wars and legends. Even so, the real beauty of reading the poems lies in discovering the difficulty in each and the delicacy with which Boland dismantles icons associated with Irish tradition and culture. Boland is literally freeing Irish poetry from its modernist moorings to oversimplified nationalist and Celtic myths, English meter and other conventions; her postmodern project permits the voices in the poem to debate among themselves, to encompass visual arts, history, philosophy and other disciplines and to navigate the Irish past and present without reducing or compromising truths she discovers.

Born in Dublin in 1944, Boland developed her distinctive voice in the course of a conservative upbringing in Dublin, London and New York City. She characterized her education good-humoredly for the Dictionary of Irish Literature: "I am convent-educated entirely…. I'm certain I lost my faith and kept my virginity there." During her father Frederick Boland's service as Irish ambassador to the Court of St. James's and to the United Nations, she faced encounters with anti-Irish teachers and childhood exile, which she recalls in such poems as "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951," "In Exile" (both in Outside History) and "In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own." These poems let the victim reverse her fate. "The Parcel" re-examines the "dying arts" of Irish living, picturing her artist mother Frances Kelly using shears "the colour of the rained-on steps" and wrapping packages for destinations no longer traversed by "doomed steamships and outdated trains."

As a student and lecturer at Trinity College, Boland gradually realized she was not "one of the boys" and became disaffected from male perspectives in British and Irish literary legacies—the original oral tales as well as their incarnations by James Clarence Mangan and William Butler Yeats. At 22, in 1967, she published New Territory, her first book. Already she questioned Yeats's revival of legends to inspire pro-Irish warring factions; his story "Belief and Unbelief" suggests that beliefs, like leprechauns, may be "better than another's truth," and may sweetly feed wild bees. In her reply, "Yeats in Civil War," Boland contrasts Yeats's voice, smelling honey "where honey could not be" (note the Platonic edge to the "bee" pun), with her own gentle questioning of his escapism "aboard a spiritship" in a land wasted by war. Boland's mixed identification with Yeats dates back to this period.

In In a Time of Violence, Boland continues to revise Yeats and others who valorize death and war. Her first section of poems reflects on historical moments including the increase in Huguenot settlements in Ireland after the French revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Protestant Peep-O-Day vigilante prosecutions of Catholics in the 1780s and the great potato famine of 1845–49. "Writing in a Time of Violence" is a memory of Boland's period at Trinity: The narrator cannot warn her youthful self, who is busy making "satin phrases" for a course in Rhetoric, that beautiful speech is dangerous and may contain and incite violent acts. In addition to targeting present bloodthirsty nationalist rivalries, this is a veiled reference to Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan, an adaptation of a Celtic myth featuring a man-eating enchantress; Maud Gonne's 1902 performance as the beautiful Irish revolutionary fueled men such as Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith to fight for Ireland. Using her own version of Virgil's voice, Boland censures the terrors hidden in language agendas that rally men to war. Instead, she describes a hill woman's memories of dire hardships.

Boland also revises Yeats's views of females in her series on dolls and artifacts. Yeats's poems such as "The Dolls" (in which talking dolls criticize a crying baby as the dollmaker's wife apologizes for her child) and "Upon a Dying Lady" employ dolls as iconic references to a living child and a dying woman. Boland's "The Dolls Museum in Dublin" details the historical damage to the dolls in the Dublin museum as the narrator replaces them on the shelf as nonliving signs of "the hostages ignorance / takes from time and ornament from destiny."

Boland's present direction of including re-created artworks as visual metaphors hanging in defined settings in her poems is foreshadowed as far back as 1967, in "From the Painting 'Back From Market' by Chardin." Boland dismisses this as a student effort, yet it appears to me to grapple rigorously with the formal, spatial and linear complexities of words. The poem juxtaposes the narrator's speculations about the actual and dream life of Chardin's peasant woman with images of the woman as one among many:

     … I think of what great art removes:
     Hazard and death, the future and the past,
     This woman's secret history and her loves—
 
     And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining
     She has just come back, where men and women
     Congregate and go
     Among the produce, learning to live from morning
     To next day, linked
     By a common impulse to survive, although
     In surging light they are single and distinct,
     Like birds in the accumulating snow.

The poem has formal and textual similarities to Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." Unlike his narrator, who observes the discrepancy in Bruegel's Icarus between the falling boy's disaster and the unruffled sailing ship, Boland's narrator considers the distances between truth, authorship and art. This poem is an early formulation of Boland's present practice of deposing some poet's notions and reinscribing values aligned with Virgil and Primo Levi.

It strikes me that many American poets of the generation matriculating in the sixties were exposed to totally different influences and expectations. My eclectic readings of E. E. Cummings, Robert Creeley, Pablo Neruda, Wole Soyinka, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Anthony Hecht and James Wright typify the age. We were going forward in history to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech at the foot of the Washington Monument and back to our disparate "roots." We protested the Vietnam War, acted up at poetry happenings. We were busy versifying the present. In search of individual identities, we set aside questions of our poetic inheritance from the above poets as well as from demonic types (Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, etc.) whose alcoholism, suicide or dysfunctional behaviors tended to be romanticized and even imitated. Many of those arguing for a public morality did not equally subscribe to a private morality, so it was an era of accumulating anxieties between men and women. "The canon" was a social club to which Emily Dickinson had not yet been admitted. Eliot, Joyce and Pound enthusiasts were careful not to associate their verse with my St. Louis hometowner and his cronies, while admirations for Gertrude Stein defied the fact that she was largely not on the syllabus.

Growing tensions regarding gender and genre added to the confusions of the Irish as well as the American seventies. In 1969, Boland married novelist Kevin Casey and moved to a Dublin suburb. Her volumes The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed and The Journey address Irish versions of the dilemma, which she now views as a cultural fiction:

Ironically, in the Irish poem, the woman's image became a text of iconic nationalism. The sense of people addressing Ireland as a woman was a very interesting fiction and a deeply misleading one, because of course it excluded all the unglamorous, difficult, complicated lives led by silent people—women who were silenced by that metaphor. Therefore, what you were left with was an ingenious complex of silences that you had to dismantle.

One can see the poet setting about this project in Outside History, which points to Boland's talent for creating fictions, paintings and philosophies in a poem. Her voice attains a satisfying resonance and depth in the course of addressing women's dilemmas and rethinking how and in what ways female consciousness could inform poetry. The five sections of poems, "Object Lessons," "Outside History," "Distances," "The Journey" and "Domestic Interior," individually and cumulatively stitch, paint and interweave the viewpoints of varied individuals into the Irish picture. In "Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening," Boland's narrator closes by saying:

     I am Chardin's woman
 
     edged in reflected light,
     hardened by
     the need to be ordinary.

Aileen McKeough's abstract, sun-colored tombstone on the cover of In a Time of Violence properly prefigures the roles of history, myths and memory in Boland's three sections of poems: "Writing in a Time of Violence," "Legends" and "Anna Liffey." The volume's primary distinguishing feature is an engaging narrative voice that acts as mediator between itself and other voices. The self-consciously interrupted narrative sequences facilitate Boland's destabilization of male hegemony over iconic references. This postmodern slant operates simultaneously on conceptual, factual and other planes, presenting sharply focused yet painterly images. The poet's beautiful-sounding lines employ irony and "metric shadows," her term for "a series of dissonances that are visibly connected to metric structure," as she replaces rhyme and traditional meter with reason and the rhythms of Irish syntax. (This contrasts with, say, Bishop's way of technically interpolating a strong meter and a strong vernacular.) The originality and the dynamic of these processes are illustrated in "Lava Cameo" and "A Woman Painted on a Leaf," from the "Legends" section, which aligns personal stories and myths.

"Lava Cameo (A brooch carved on volcanic rock)" incises a tale based upon an oral fragment about Boland's grandmother meeting her sea captain husband at each port where his ship docked because she "feared the women." Both die young. Using the brooch as a controlling metaphor intended to be, Boland told one audience, "the inscribed face on the material of destruction," the poet invents a picture that speaks to and forges connections between the past and the present, as the narrator considers a core theme:

     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 …

"A Woman Painted on a Leaf," the closing poem of In a Time of Violence, reaffirms the poet's intention to free or destroy stale and contrived images of women—to remove them from the imprisoning frame of disingenuous Irish and world mythology. (In fact, Boland has set up this denouement in "Anna Liffey," by stating "The body is a source. Nothing more," and admitting that "In the end / Everything that burdened and / distinguished me / Will be lost in this: / I was a voice.") The twenty-eight-line poem appears simple, yet its complexities show, rather than merely describe, its injunction to destroy falsehood. First the narrator composes a scene:

     I found it among curios and silver.
     in the pureness of wintry light.

The narrator next decries the suffocating "suspension of life" seen in the face on the "veined surface":

     This is not death. It is the terrible
     suspension of life.
 
     I want a poem
     I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.
 
     I want to take
     this dried-out face,
     as you take a starling from behind iron,
     and return it to its element of air, of ending—

The narrator proceeds to free—or to project the freeing of—the artifact, until it is a leaf,

     a crisp tinder underfoot. Cheekbones. Eyes. Will be
     a mouth crying out. Let me.
 
     Let me die.

These last words are spoken by the artifact, in the sound of its own demise under someone's foot. This gives the image the last word but also puts words into the mouth of a leaf that is in the act of being destroyed by the narrator. In effect, this seems to leave suspended, in the place of the image on a leaf, the narrator's wish to face facts about aging and dying within the composed pictures in poems.

With apparent simplicity, Boland frames the large aesthetic and historic issues central to the poet's concerns. How can a poem "age"? How can a poem convey life rather than a stale myth? In posing a philosophical and epistemological suggestion in the center of the poem, and in leaving it partially unanswered, Boland arrives at a meaningful ambiguity. Many qualities resonate beyond the poem's simple construction: the "I want" allusions to William Blake's Songs of Innocence, the lively assonance in "as you take a starling from behind iron," and the antithetical correlation between freeing a dead image and a live bird from false associations.

Boland combines impeccable craft, resilient metaphors and, above all, moral authority in order to witness human difficulties. Critics already align her ideas with those of Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood, and I'd add Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer and William Gass. Fictions and sustained metaphors enlarge her literal views of her Irish roots and culture. Boland's ethical perspective is as personal and universal as her focus on the dispossessed and war casualties and on roles within a family. Through her dedication to poetry, one might say Boland has "lost her virginity yet kept her faith" in a way few adults have done. As she squarely confronts the reader with everyday acts, you don't have to be Irish to understand that her messages point toward a future morality a long way off—one in which gender or other classifications do not diminish, essentialize or reduce, one in which our humanity toward one another is evenhanded.