SOURCE: "Finding a Voice Where She Found a Vision," in P. N. Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, September-October, 1994, pp. 13-17.

[In the following essay, Allen-Randolph traces Boland's career and defends her as a major poet.]

It is hard to think of an Irish poet whose work has, over the last two decades, shown as much growth and courage as Eavan Boland's. Eight years ago the widespread establishment view in Ireland had branded her a technically gifted but minor poet. Today, with the recent publication by Carcanet of her latest volume of poetry In a Time of Violence and a selection of her prose essays on the way from Norton, she is increasingly officialized as the feminine laureate, or simply, and more accurately, as a major poet.

The quick shifts in recent years of Boland's status—from woman poet, to feminist poet, to leading woman poet, to major poet—reflect the stresses and turmoil in the Irish literary world as it struggles to come to terms with its own unwinding history of prejudice. Because Boland's trajectory as a poet is both emblematic and symptomatic of resistance and change in the critical environment of Irish poetry itself over the past twenty-five years, this may be the time to offer a cursory account of her achievement to date. And, at a few key points, to take a look at the equally interesting reception of that achievement in Ireland.

Boland became a poet in the early sixties as one of an extraordinarily gifted generation of Irish poets (Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Kennelly), among whom there was considerable contact, camaraderie, and debate. They were, in the sense that structure and form seemed second nature to them even as young practitioners, the last generation of nineteenth-century poets. The impressive first books of Boland's colleagues set them firmly on a course to inherit what was, until quite recently, an almost exclusively male establishment, and guaranteed their leadership of the literary field in the seventies and eighties. Boland's career and her reputation as a poet took a quite different course.

After what is customarily, and I think wrongly, viewed as 'a brilliant false start' with her first volume, Boland moved with each successive volume farther away from the old intersection between poetry and maleness which comprised the mainstream of Irish poetry. Consequently, her work lost status and grew less visible to that mainstream and status during the years between 1975 and 1987. Moreover, despite the consistency of her themes and obsessions, finding her voice as a poet came slowly over the course of her first three volumes. Looking back now, those early volumes chart a course, remarkable for its risk, experiment, and individual conscience.

Boland began as the exuberantly formal young poet of New Territory, an ambitious, dreamy, high-toned book, the most striking features of which were the young poet's lapidary genius for imagery, her command of a range of poetic forms, and a lyric voice so conventional that you would never know it belonged to a woman. Her chief influence was Yeats, and under his radiant shadow, she found her first subjects at the glamorous intersection between national myth and poetic legend. Central images of imprisonment—the metaphor which underwrites Boland's best work—dominate most of the poems. The volume's best poems ('New Territory', 'Athene's Song', 'Back from the Market', and 'The Winning of Etain') are located in an anxiety about what must have seemed at the time an unbridgeable distance between being a poet and being a woman. Over the course of the next six volumes, this distance would become one of Boland's most abiding subjects, driving her to her deepest and richest themes, as she laboured to restore to poetry 'what great art removes: / Hazard and Death, the future and the past, / This woman's secret history and her loves….'

By 1975 Boland's gifted colleagues were well on their way to being nominated as secondary superstars to the political situation in the North. Boland herself was making a less spectacular entrance into the realm of public poetry with her second volume, The War Horse, a searching, uneven attempt to articulate a relation between the escalating political violence, her vocation as a poet, and her identity as a woman. By reworking a vernacular voice across formal stanzas, Boland began to blend the formal elements of her craft with the familiar elements of her experience. Several first-rate poems—'The War Horse' for instance, and the beautiful elegy 'Child of Our Time'—emerged from this effort. But the real break through poems, 'Suburban Woman' and 'Ode to Suburbia', came at the end of the volume where Boland struggled to bring together unwieldy fragments of artistic, national and gendered identity. These were not good poems, yet their net effect was both important and disruptive. By constructing an encounter between two fractured elements of a single self—poet and woman—Boland mobilized gender into a sequence of debates with poetry, with violence, and with Irishness. At the end of the volume, poet and woman are 'defeated' by the unsuccessful effort, and 'survive, we two, housed / together in my compromise, my craft / who are of one another the first draft'.

Over the course of her next two volumes, Boland would draft the lives and bodies of women into the very centre of the Irish poem, where she would deepen her exploration of the relation between gender, violence, and national identity. This new direction greatly perplexed her Irish male readership, who believed it was a movement off the chart of Irish poetry altogether. Written nearly simultaneously, then organized for publication as two sides—the lyric and the anti-lyric—of a single project, it was the first instalment of the two-volume effort, In Her Own Image, which so non-plussed Boland's Irish critics. One reviewer accused her of expressing in 'these curiously unpleasant and at times offensive poems', 'an extraordinary hatred of womanhood, an obsession with femininity regarded as an inferno of self-torture'. Another thought the poems were 'belligerently feminine' and dealt only 'with strictly feminine matters such as anorexia, mastectomy, and wife-battering' (italics mine). A third reviewer noted that while Boland 'had suffered a feminist vision,' there was nevertheless a 'triumphant affirmation of womanhood throughout the book'. Clearly Boland had hit a nerve, and the consequences she suffered in doing so threw the flaws and smallmindedness of the critical climate into bold relief.

The volume opens with a reproach to the Muse ('Tirade for the Mimic Muse'), a bitter attack on the national muse of Irish cultural unity: 'I know you for the ruthless bitch you are: / Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse …' The vehicle of the poem is a dramatic encounter between muse and the woman poet who shows her the realities she has suppressed and the violences, public and private, she has colluded with. The volume then proceeds through a series of ten dramatic monologues whose subjects—anorexia, wife-beating, infanticide, masturbation, menstruation, mastectomy—are degraded states of experience and self-discovery. The point of this painful progress is to explore the interface between public-domain images of women, the uses to which those images have been put, and the privately suffered realities they edit. Or, as Boland once put it, to examine 'the weight of the feminine convention on the individual woman'.

With its angry, estranged tones, its pared-down stanzas, its fractured iambics, and its use of experience from women's lives as metaphors for human oppression, In Her Own Image was indeed a radical departure with a radical result: a very visible shift in Boland's readership and constituency. Her new constituency was comprised of the women whose lives, bodies and experiences she was carefully moving to the centre of her work, and it contained a growing, largely urban, feminist contingent. Yet, while the upsurge of feminism in the seventies and the Irish Women's Movement had helped to make women writers like Boland more visible, it did little to surmount the problem of ghettoization of those writers as women. Boland's establishment readership, dismissive of 'women's' themes in poetry, summarily dispatched the book as part of what they construed as a second-rate feminist trend, of sociological, not artistic impulse. So unquestioned was this orthodox view of poetry by women that an Irish Times reviewer wondered in print whether Boland would 'carry on down the thematically limiting road of the Sisters, or return to dance again on the general iambic table'.

In my narrative of Boland's critical reception, I do not wish to imply that she was in any way excluded from Irish literary life. She wasn't. Indeed, as a staff reviewer for the Irish Times, and a radio presenter with her own poetry program on RTE each week, she had accesses and opportunities unimaginable to young poets in other countries. What I am trying to establish here is some of the history, both within her poetry and outside of it, which might explain why her emergence and recognition as 'major' poet came relatively late in her publishing career, and by a seemingly more circuitous route than her generational colleagues.

Boland's fourth, and exceptionally brave, volume Night Feed was one of the most important volumes of Irish poetry produced by her generation, though it could not have been more unfashionable at the time, or more poorly welcomed. To the refined local ears of the elite establishment which continued to view 'women's' writing as a kind of provincial female backwater of domesticity and homelife, it must have seemed an astonishing choice. To her new feminist readership, the traditional female roles and values celebrated by the book seemed emphatically regressive. Not surprisingly then, the book was received on all sides with an embarrassed critical silence. One well-known male poet cited it, in a private conversation, as evidence that Boland's talent and ambition as a poet had gone seriously awry. There was, however, a huge, silent, powerless constituency for this volume: I can not count the number of times over the past decade that a woman in passing conversation has told me how much that book meant 'to those of us who were at home, raising our children and living that life'.

What was most anomalous about the silence which followed the release of Night Feed was that it was clearly Boland's breakthrough volume, in which she hit her stride as a poet, found her voice, and harnessed a poetic self to a powerful private vision. Thematically, the volume is centred in the series of domestic interiors it frames.

The precedents for these poems came not from verse but from painting. Boland turned to the still lives and domestic interiors of Jean Baptiste Chardin and Jan van Eyck, who, by recognizing the distinction in the homely, revealed their objects as much as they described them. Boland's technique of describing ordinary things with such fresh significance that they become a universe in themselves is learned from these painters. In 'Domestic Interior', a poem which takes van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage as its starting point, she explains:

     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.

What gave this volume such rare lyric force was not just the happy combination of its fresh perspective, its thrillingly precise imagery, its clean-edged, uncluttered line, and speech rhythms, but the authoritative new voice it inscribed: ordinary, female and maternal. With the publication of Night Feed, a whole psychic terrain was written back into Irish poetry, one which restored its scope and complexity. Paradoxically, it was at this moment, when she was least visible to the literary mainstream, that Boland was in fact becoming the mainstream. Poems like 'Domestic Interior' and 'Night Feed' are written not, as her critics thought, from the outskirts of poetry, but from the lyric centre.

While the successes of Night Feed went largely unrecognized, they cleared the way for major leaps in Boland's technical development over her next two volumes, and unleashed a prodigious productivity both in poetry and in critical prose essays over the next twelve years. In The Journey, using a much longer, discordant, more flexible line, Boland brought together the combined achievement of her previous volumes—mixing lyric with anti-lyric, the dark with the celebratory sides of experience—within a single poem and project. The Journey made explicit the implicitly political project of Night Feed: making women's lives a source of redefinition for what is Irish. By taking the voice she'd found in Night Feed, and modulating it across different alignments of experience—maternal, national, literary—Boland began to write a formidable political poem.

More specifically, Boland was interested in disrupting the image of women and the family, essential to the iconography of nationalism, that had been a transcendent unity of identity enshrined in the Irish constitution, and inherited by Irish poetry, after the terrible disruptions of the famine. She accomplished this by several methods. In poems like 'Listen. This is the Noise of Myth' and 'Mise Eire', she juxtaposed the romanticized fictions of female figures carried in traditional Irish myths, songs, and poems, with her own fictions of their 'bereavements of the definite'. In other poems, she juxtaposed inherited conventions with the vivid, everyday experiences and identities they excluded (see 'The Oral Tradition', 'The Glass King', and 'Tirade for the Lyric Muse'). She combined these juxtapositions with expert modulations of voice and image. In 'Mise Eire' ('I am Ireland') for instance, she invokes the latent idealized imagery of the Irish feminine emblem, Mother Ireland, only to destabilize it by flashing three voices across it in quick succession: the voice of the woman poet, a garrison prostitute, and an immigrant mother. By confronting the nation with its definitional others in poems like this, Boland began to reconfigure what counted as political.

Her efforts were not limited to the Irish poem however; many of the poems in The Journey raise ethical questions about the costs, corruptions, and exclusions of art, and the dangers of its ornamentalising tendencies. In poems like 'Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening' and her impressive subversion of the dream-vision convention, 'The Journey', she chooses Chardin and Dante as starting points to show us what art has left out:

     Depend upon it, somewhere a poet is wasting
     his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious
     emblem instead of the real thing.
     Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop dipped
     in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb,
     so every day the language gets less
 
     for the task and we are less with the language.

The buzz of excitement about the political spirit and lyric maturity of The Journey was evident among communities of women poets and scholars and a growing ripple of acclaim was heard both in the universities and in some of the more progressive corners of literary establishment. The prejudicial cliché about second rate women's work soon evolved into a similarly-toned cliché about feminist politics in the mouths of the same influential arbiters who dismissed women poets for their politics as they admired male poets for theirs. From the loftiest heights of the establishment Boland's latest work could still be dismissed as 'feminist polemical verse', which 'suffers the constraints of intentionalism'. Again, what many critics failed to see was that Boland was not only writing some of the best Irish poetry of the day, but that what they saw as a feminist defilement of a great tradition was actually an essential contribution to it. What Boland was challenging, and the debate over her work was revealing, was an ethical fault-line in Irish poetry, and the small-minded views in the critical environment which supported it.

Returning to the territory of a public poetry she had not written since the seventies, Boland continued the work of untwining and redefining the feminine and the national in Outside History. After The War Horse, Boland had turned her attentions to the 'women's' worlds outside the acceptable borders of Irish poetry. Here, with a darkening lyric vision, an elegiac tone, and a high degree of technical finish, she turned those privately suffered and silent worlds into a powerful alternative history. By locating these worlds outside of history, as her title stipulates, Boland is calling attention to the unrecorded life which moves away from, or is edited out of, the official account of both literature and history.

The formal high-point of the volume is its ambitious title sequence which has an ingenious clock-like configuration: twelve poems cycle through timescapes of changing light and changing seasons, suggesting both the twelve positions on a clock-face and the twelve months of the calendar. Boland runs this nailed-down structure against the argument of the sequence: that time, like myth, is an artificial human construct—an attempt to restrict meaning by controlling it—which ultimately breaks down in the face of mortality. The history of the sequence's title is at once Eavan Boland's personal history and the history of her nation. When she uses one as a metaphor for the other, as she does in 'The Achill Woman' and 'What We Lost', she writes with an unforgettable mixture of courage and perception. In 'What We Lost', using a voice which has deepened in resonance and authority, Boland tells the story of a child (her mother) who is told a story which, 'unheard' and 'unshared' is forgotten:

      Believe it, what we lost is here in this room
      on this veiled evening …
 
      The fields are dark already.
      The frail connections have been made and are broken.
      The dumb-show of legend has become language,
      is becoming silence and who will know that once
 
      words were possibilities and disappointments …

The power and sweep of the sequence is a function of the silences into which it taps. The silences of women in these poems are all the more poignant because they are widened to include so many people, past and present, North and South.

By self-consciously using the eye of the outsider in this book, Boland defies the distinctions of inside and outside. By relocating the significant experiences of Irishness in the voices of the traditionally marginalized, she challenges the notion of a central, orthodox Irishness through a perspective that is both subtle and daily, fully attentive to culture as it is constituted not necessarily in tradition but always in human interaction and suffering. Regardless of her subject, she locates history and politics in daily relationships of power, grief, alienation, identification and love.

In Ireland Outside History was received quietly and slowly at first, and then with growing enthusiasm, counterpointed by the immediate critical attention and acclaim it received in the United States, where critics were quick to notice the challenge it made to a narrow male appropriation of Irish writing and the Irish past. In the year immediately following the publication of Outside History, this challenge finally broke out in earnest in the form of a media debate over The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. By leaving women largely out of their 1980s redefinition of Ireland, the Field Day generation had exhibited a myopia symptomatic of a wider cultural one: they had failed to take account of the ways in which women were centrally concerned with the formation of national subjectivity and iconology. When the members of Field Day refused to debate the issue in Ireland (a subsequent Channel 4 debate with Tom Paulin representing Field Day only worsened matters), the Irish media supported the critique and the poets, Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnail, who launched it.

Two years have passed since the Field Day episode, and the enormous change in the critical environment is partially visible in the warm and immediate welcome of Boland's seventh and most recent volume In a Time of Violence. The sound of heavy hammering, of every element put perfectly into place, which was the trademark of Outside History is relaxed here into plainer speech, fewer technical props, and a warmer, looser tone reminiscent of Night Feed. Her primary mode is elegy, and her interest in the history of objects—a cameo, a hand-embroidered dress or doll, a glass-blown swan, a statue of a weeping woman—is elegiac: it deals with what is fixed, locked, lost, and loved. In 'The Parcel', written in free verse, Boland makes an argument about the mortality of art forms and their arbitrators. Here the art of parcel-preparing which the poet remembers from childhood, an art passed down from mother to daughter, has suddenly disappeared, and with it the life and circumstances which validated it. As art changes to meet the pressures of present realities, its arbitrators, here the blade sharpener, disappear overnight.

The volume is divided into three sections. The first is a pessimistic seven-poem sequence, 'Writing in a Time of Violence' which builds incrementally an argument about the way powerful elements of expression, especially in times of violence, can repress or destroy elements of ethics. The danger of all writing, Boland suggests here, is that the furious forces engaged in the act get accessorized into ornament in the end. The sequence works by juxtaposition: each poem takes an expressive form or ornament—a map, a painting, a letter, a dress, a doll, a hand-carved cot, or a device of rhetoric—and sets it against the dark background of the violence of its age. Moreover, each expressive form or ornament survives as a witness to the elements of control and self-deception of its age, and gives the age a distorted meaning, devoid of the suffered lives which created them.

In the opening poem, 'That the Science of Cartography is Limited', Boland exposes the geography of human experience and suffering which remains outside the borders of the map-maker's art: 'the fragrance of balsam', 'the gloom of cypresses' and the abrupt end of a road, the only remaining sign of the terrible deaths of the 1847 famine. 'In a Bad Light', a poem about Irish seamstresses in St Louis during the American Civil War, pushes the argument further. All that survives of the 'coffin ships, and the salt of exile' are the dresses they sewed their deaths into for 'history's abandonment'. Abandoned by history, the suffered life is subsumed by the ornament of its labour. This, Boland tells us, 'is the nightmare'.

In the final poem of the sequence, 'Beautiful Speech', language itself is the dangerous ornament in a country 'already lost … in song and figure'. Here Boland employs the legend of St Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland to show the dangerous underbelly of language and myth, where the very sweetness of the language and the old stories are seductions to collusion. With her beautifully handled time changes from past to present, and her implicit evocation of the Eve myth, Boland is addressing the temptations of language, ornament, and unexamined stances which confront young poets generally, and women poets specifically. But in her use of the pronoun 'we' and her choice of the word citizen, implying as it does membership in collective identity ('we have lived / where language is concealed. Is perilous. / We will be—we have been—citizens of its hiding place') she widens the political sweep of the poem to include everyone who shares an Irish past or present. The poem expertly moves us through the local setting of the poet's youth 'where friends call out their farewells in / a city of whispers and interiors' and steps us squarely into the heartbreak of the national dilemma where:

      the dear vowels
      Irish Ireland Ours are
      absorbed into Autumn air,
      are out of earshot in the distances
      we are stepping into where we never
 
      imagine words such as hate
      and territory and the like—unbanished still
      as they always would be—wait
      and are waiting under
      beautiful speech to strike.

The second section of the volume, 'Legends', is a series of poems about children and growing older, lost stories and lost arts. The characters of legend here are not from some other world but are the husbands, daughters, and mothers of daily life. Their living presences, illuminated by the poet's love, are directly counterpoised to the darker vision of ornamental objects in 'Writing in a Time of Violence', thus challenging the drama of power in the sequence with the drama of love in the following section. Here the poems take place in the realms 'between expectation and memory', and all involve myths of loss, 'the moment all nature fears and tends towards'.

In the last section of the volume, 'Anna Liffey', Boland picks up the argument about the ornamentalizing dangers of language again, and joins it to an argument about ageing. Stepping out of her house on a spring evening in 'Time and Violence' the poet encounters a multiple aisling, a series of ornamentalized women, sexual captives within their frozen images—a shepherdess, Cassiopeia in the night sky and, in a pool beneath cherry trees, a mermaid with 'invented tresses'—who plead to be made human 'in cadences of change and mortal pain / and words we can grow old and die in.' But the radical heart of this new volume is the long title poem of this section, 'Anna Liffey'.

'Anna Liffey' is Boland's usurpation of Joyce's riverized Molly Bloom, Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegan's Wake, and her version follows his fairly closely. Joyce's narrative begins with two young washerwomen at the source of the Liffey, having a conversation about their lives and the river. Anna Livia, the river personified, thinks back over her own life and remembers how she has been a cloud, a shower, a rivulet, a brook, before becoming a river. As the river progresses, Anna Livia becomes a woman. And as she flows downstream to the sea, she yields her place to her daughter who appears, as she did in youth, in the formation of rain. When the city is reached at dusk, the two washerwomen have grown old, turning into elements of the landscape in the form of a tree and a stone, and the river goes 'home slowly now by own way' until it is lost. But the narrative, imitating the circular geography of the Liffey, loops back around again to the beginning.

In Boland's version, like Joyce's, the river is made of language and memory. The poem is constructed as an open sequence of thirteen unnumbered sections which reflect the thirteen bridges the River Liffey crosses under on its passage from its source in County Wicklow to its destination in the Irish sea. Creating a kind of fragmented spatial argument about names, the body, identity, and language, the poem asks the central questions about consciousness, then extends them: What makes a self? Where is it located? What makes a place? A home? A nation?

Boland's poem follows the movement and theme of the Joycean narrative, the same succession of source, city, daughters and rain. However Boland omits Joyce's washerwomen and begins her narrative instead with the legend of how the river Liffey and the land around it got its name, from a woman who loved them. Against this myth, Boland counterpoints the growth of her own national consciousness: 'My country took hold of me. / My children were born.' 'The beautiful vowels sounding out home' are the names of her children, not her country; the love here is for the people, not the land. By thus conscientiously repositioning language and identity through the witness of the woman's life in poetry, Boland is creating a source for the redefinition of both poetry and national identity.

Technically speaking, 'Anna Liffey' occurs at an important intersection of gender and genre: it is Boland's usurpation of the big, fragmented Modernist fusion poem proposed by Eliot. It employs a symbolist-cinematic technique which replicates the elements of perception by key repetitions of image and cadence—'a woman in the doorway of house. / a river in the city of her birth'. The images build to fuse into one intense central image at the end, in this case, the river. A series of fractured arguments are carried within the images, and they too fuse in the end into one intense argument about identity and mortality. The self, the woman in the doorway of her home, becomes the centrifugal force in the poem.

Here the high style of the great Modernist poem is subverted by using a non-high self. What we are watching is the poetically inadmissible self of the ageing woman, like the maternal woman in Night Feed, being made an admissible self in poetry. The static voice of the female figure is being usurped, and made to age in the poem; it is being returned, like the tears, the rain, and the river, to a state of process. A revision of the poetic self occurs as the poem moves powerfully to align itself with the voices of the time. It does not foreground its alliance with the elite stance of the poet, but locates itself in the powerlessness of an ordinary figure: A woman standing in a doorway of a house, who changes and ages as she moves through her life, her motherhood and her sexual identity, and becomes a voice. It is the movement of this voice to the centre of lyric poetry, where it interrogates the huge constructs of literature and nation, which underwrites the radical accomplishment of the poem.

It would be difficult to over-estimate the influence and change Boland has brought both to perceptions of Irish poetry and to the practice of it over the last two decades. The life she has inscribed in poetry exists as a powerful challenge and corrective to tradition. The professional fraternities—literary and academic—who were so quick to assign her a marginal status must now accept that not only was she exploring a different register of experience, with a different audience, but that register and audience have become the mainstream. In Ireland, one week after its release, In a Time of Violence is at the top of the best-seller list for non-fiction. An indication, perhaps, that Boland's post-mortem prediction at the end of 'Anna Liffey' is not so premature after all:

      In the end
      It will not matter
      That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
      The body is a source, nothing more …
      In the end
      everything that burdened and distinguished me
      will be lost in this:
      I was a voice.