SOURCE: "Paroling Sweet Euphony," in Parnassus, Vol. 22, Nos. 1 and 2, 1997, pp. 223-46.

[In the following review, Foy asserts that Boland's poems will stand "not on the politics that burdens and distinguishes them for now but on the hardihood of their afterlife as a lyrical voice."]

Publicly, provocatively, and at length, Eavan Boland has ruminated on the issues that impel her poetry. These range from the Virgilian Latin, classical myths, and English poetry she learned in school to the "ordinary life" she stepped into as mother and wife in her beloved suburban Dublin. The burdens of this heritage come under her elegant scrutiny in the prose memoir Object Lessons, where we encounter the generous human perspectives that shape her work as well as the specifically Irish pressures—political and literary—that continue to inflect her voice. Behind and over all of these, however, looms a question as old as Plato. Though never fully sounded in the memoirs, it's a question that bears upon the poetry in An Origin Like Water as well as the earlier collections In a Time of Violence and Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990. It has to do with that ancient enmity between Truth and "sweet euphony." One of the pleasures of reading Boland is to eavesdrop on this quarrel mediated by a sensibility both political and lyrical—to watch her bicameral imagination play itself out in the very lines.

The title sequence of In a Time of Violence opens with Plato's Socrates, the seminal indictor of poets. Given Boland's career-long, often brilliant, sometimes maddening arraignment of poetic norms, her invocation of this harsh judge sets up a density of meanings. As epigraph to the sequence, Boland excerpts the case against poets, from Book X of the Republic:

As in a city where the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater or less.

When Socrates damns the "imitative poets," he is, alas, damning all poets, who slink about in Plato's dialectics as poor simulators thrice removed from truth. In another passage from Book X (this one not cited by Boland), Socrates warns Glaucon of the mealy-mouths and their sweet, putatively ruinous influence:

The poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colors of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in meter and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well—such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colors which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

So Socrates sends the poet packing, who "awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason." The real reprobates here turn out to be meter, harmony, and rhythm, all of which conspire to distort the simple truth. Always at the back of Boland's mind, this famous defamation fires her own doubts about the allurements of language.

One wonders what Boland is up to with this suicidal gesture, posting Socrates' condemnation over the doorway into her poem. But it soon becomes clear. The seven-part sequence promotes truth ahead of beauty while inquiring into the physical and psychic violence that ravages those caught up in Irish history. Among its virtues, the sequence both illuminates and enacts the long-standing quarrel by attending to the claims of historical fact while not wholly renouncing the linguistic surface. The lead poem of the sequence builds its conceit upon the image of the tragically futile "famine roads" in Ireland. These ghostly make-work roads were sponsored by the Relief Committees to provide starving Irish workers with employment during the worst of the famine. The poem demands quoting in full since it vividly displays Boland's contending impulses.

     I "That the Science of Cartography Is Limited"
 
     —and not simply by the fact that this shading of
     forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
     the gloom of cypresses,
     is what I wish to prove.
 
     When you and I were first in love we drove
     to the borders of Connacht
     and entered a wood there.
 
     Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
 
     I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
     rough-cast stone had
     disappeared into as you told me
     in the second winter of their ordeal, in
 
     1847, when the crop had failed twice,
     Relief Committees gave
     the starving Irish such roads to build.
 
     Where they died, there the road ended
 
     and ends still 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.

Right away we witness the bicameral imagination in debate. A blunt, forensic assertion pushes the poem forward, obliging the title to run syntactically into the first stanza. While the stance is heavily rhetorical and the air a bit courtroomish (she's going to prove the truth of a proposition about the science of map-making), the insinuations of syntax (the abstract noun clause followed by the painterly particulars—the balsams and cypresses—in a long appositive with an iambic hint) whisper the intricate secrets of the lyrical.

Boland next lays down a line carrying the full genetic code of the Tradition: "When you and I were first in love we drove …" The line steps along in perfect iambic pentameter. But as if to show that what she considers imitative prosodic posturing cannot bear the moral import of her poem, Boland quickly jerks back to uneven, truth-telling lineation, closer to the simple prose prescribed by Socrates: "When you and I were first in love we drove / to the borders of Connacht / and entered a wood there." The iambic pentameter's momentary poise and civility ("When you and I were first in love we drove …), along with its literary and political associations, are voted down by succeeding stanzas of varying lengths and unpredictable lineation.

This toying with sanctioned cadences is one of the means Boland has chosen repeatedly in her work to negotiate a new pact between Truth and prosodic tradition. She makes this point clear in Object Lessons: The old strains, representative of a male-dominated order of Irish poetry, are no longer up to the job of conveying truth, at least not the truths of her "hidden life" as suburban wife and mother and the heretofore silenced women in Irish poetry. The Tradition lets down its drawbridge automatically for no man, or woman. One must fight, and Boland has. Her way in as poet is to "subvert the old order" by advancing the ethical dimension over the formal and aesthetic. A part of the "Cartography" poem, fulfilling the ethical mandate, bears dangerously bald witness, in naked lines, to the obscure sufferings of famine victims in the mid 1800s:

      Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
 
      I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
      rough-cast stone had
      disappeared into as you told me
      in the second winter of their ordeal, in
 
      1847, when the crop had failed twice,
      Relief Committees gave
      the starving Irish such roads to build.

The fact of the famine roads is a testimony to human suffering. But the fact alone does not constitute poetry—the lines themselves here are a little too bleached.

Luckily, the poem goes on to satisfy more fully its lyrical calling. Weaving through thirteen lines, the final sentence jaggedly generates itself out of plain statement ("Where they died, there the road ended") and into an emotionally charged, syntactically voluptuous reckoning:

     Where they died, there the road ended
 
     and ends still 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.

Here Boland voices a genuine indignation. Necessity's twisting power is conveyed in the long, periodic sentence whose syntax winds strenuously through the uneven cut of the stanzas. As if to compensate for the famine roads that peter out where the builders died, Boland's sentence drives ahead to its definite, incensed end. Read aloud, the last thirteen lines break convincingly, just about where the speaking voice might hesitate to isolate phrases and distribute weight. The line breaks are governed not by prosodic patterns but by the ebb and flow of an emotionally propelled argument. The quality of the phrasing and the involuted syntax (mirroring the complexities of emotion and conceit) together create the lyrical texture.

The poem laments those things of deep human importance that never make it onto the official map—like the famine roads. These desperate, failed excursions work as metaphors for the women who, Boland argues, have not made it onto Ireland's literary map. And if we equate traditional stanzaic structures and iambic pentameter with the official prosodic map, as I believe Boland intends, then we see how, on the formal level, Boland has admirably extended the conceit: The subtext tells us that she is no longer interested in the official "apt renderings" and "ingenious designs" she mastered early on, in her Movement-influenced poems, which she refers to as "derivative, formalist, gesturing poems" marked by "the neat stanza, the well broken line." Her comments evince a mild disdain for the apprentice work, all those early raids on the Tradition that gave her form. Boland's exfoliating talents and dedication to the art have since enabled her to make those forms her own, to adapt and transcend them, and to move to the center of her poems whatever she has wished to.

Her earliest work, well represented in An Origin Like Water, shows a precocious and enviable formal control. "The Poets," from New Territory, Boland's first book, was written before her 23rd birthday:

      They, like all creatures, being made
      For the shovel and worm,
      Ransacked their perishable minds and found
      Pattern and form
      And with their own hands quarried from hard words
      A figure in which secret things confide.
 
      They are abroad. Their spirits like a pride
      Of lions circulate.
 
      Are desperate. Just as the jeweled beast,
      That lion constellate,
      Whose scenery is Betelgeuse and Mars,
      Hunts without respite among fixed stars.
 
      And they prevail. To his undoing every day
      The essential sun
      Proceeds, but only to accommodate
      A tenant moon
      And he remains until the very break
      Of morning, absentee landlord of the dark.

The only point a formalist could fault here is the Miltonic inversion endloading a Latinate adjective to give us "lion constellate." The slant rhymes work deftly at the ends of enjambed lines sustained by a compelling iambic pulse. The phrasing sparkles with power—the moon an "absentee landlord of the dark." Not men's power, and not women's power—just the linguistic firepower of a poet, albeit one Boland comes to question. Another of Boland's signature quirks is the syntactic fragment, which she often relies on, as in this case ("Are desperate."), to communicate a significant afterthought. Here she is again, doing the Movement, before age 23, in the last stanza of "Belfast vs. Dublin":

     We have had time to talk and strongly
     Disagree about the living out
     Of life. There was no need to shout.
     Rightly or else quite wrongly
     We have run out of time, if not of talk.
     Let us then cavalierly fork
     Our ways since we, and all unknown,
     Have called into question one another's own.

She knows her Auden and her Yeats. (In Object Lessons, Boland acknowledges her debts, paying particular tribute to Yeats.)

She demonstrates that fluent control and power again in her next book, The War Horse. In a poem dedicated to her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey, Boland weighs flesh and blood against imagination:

     I know you have a world I cannot share
     Where a woman waits for you, beautiful,
     Young no doubt, protected in your care
     From stiffening and wrinkling, not mortal
 
     Not shy of her own mirror. How can I rival
     Her when like another wife she waits
     To come into the pages of your novel,
     Obediently, as if to your bed on nights
 
     She is invited nor, as in your other life
     I do, reminds you daily of the defeat
     Of time nor, as does your other wife,
     Binds you to the married state?
 
     She is the other woman. I must share
     You with her time and time again,
     Book after book. Yet I am aware,
     Love, that I may have the better bargain:
 
     I imagine she has grown strange
     To you among the syntax and the sentences
     By which you distance her. And would exchange
     Her speaking part for any of our silences.
                              ("Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist")

Nothing in these well-wrought stanzas chafes from undue strain or tweaking. The tender accusations come through softly, kept aloft on rhymes that evade a too-perfect equivalence, set up as they are at different syntactic junctures. Aside from being a masterly poem, this seems to me a fair assessment of a real woman's advantages over a fictive female. Life, the poem concedes, is different from art.

Many of Boland's poems, however, fume over the fact that a woman can be fixed, frozen, and distanced by sentences. This seems less a political posture than a kicking against the very nature of words and syntax. Boland is much enamored of both. I suspect that in the structurally looser "Cartography," as in much of her later work, she is intent on delivering the formal control out of the hands of line and stanza (the traditional keepers) and into those of syntax alone—syntax "the controller," as Seamus Heaney has called it, "the compelling element that binds the constituent elements of sense into active unity." Boland expresses this beautifully in her own words:

     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 …
         (from "Lava Cameo," In a Time of Violence)

Of course, an impassioned syntax doesn't control and shape in the same ways conventional line and stanza do. The "shape" that syntax alone imparts is a tonal one, an emotional and linguistic texture felt in the very way the phrase and clause are put together and broken; this, then, also unifies a poem and in the absence of conventional pattern defines what it is.

This force is felt in the syntactically complex lines that conclude "Cartography." Boland's breakaway tactics enable her to escape from the hothouse of formal expectation with her poems still unwilted. Some of the most engaging passages in Object Lessons describe her growing disillusionment with Anglo-Irish poetic form as an abstract entrapment:

I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it seemed, live in both. As the author of [formal, conventional] poems I was an equal partner in Irish poetry. As a woman—about to set out on the life which was the passive object of many of those poems—I had no voice. It had been silenced, ironically enough, by the very powers of language I aspired to and honored. By the elements of form I had worked hard to learn … However abstract it looked from outside, the paragraph of language and music was beginning to seem a crucial part of a whole, wider question of identity.

And then this insightful formulation, vital to anyone who claims to be a poet:

But already I knew—from a few mysterious moments of writing—something about form. Already I sensed that real form—the sort that made time turn and wander when you read a poem—came from a powerful meeting between a hidden life and a hidden chance in language.

In Boland's best work, two hidden quantities meet and well up together: an avenging, subterranean moral imperative and an urge to sing. This confluence can't help setting in motion a strong, distinguishing current that cuts its own banks.

Boland's poems fare less well when, swayed by the admonitions of Socrates, they tilt towards documentary:

      This is St. Louis. Where the rivers meet.
      The Illinois. The Mississippi. The Missouri.
      The light is in its element in Autumn.
      Clear. With yellow Gingko leaves falling.
      There is always a nightmare. Even in such light.
      (from "In a Bad Light," section 4 of the sequence "Writing in a Time of Violence")

Even the few painterly details of light and Gingko leaves are not enough to energize this stanza. The speaker—it's Boland—stands in a museum in St. Louis inspecting a miniature display of nineteenth-century American riverboat culture:

      I stand in a room in the Museum.
      In one glass case a plastic figure
      represents a woman in a dress,
      with crepe sleeves and a satin apron.
      And feet laced neatly into suede.
 
      She stands in a replica of a cabin
      on a steamboat bound for New Orleans.
      The year is 1860. Nearly war.
      A notice says no comforts were spared. The silk
      is French. The seamstresses are Irish.

As if to demonstrate scorn for verbal discrimination, Boland here allows the preposition "in" to overcrowd the first three lines above. It has taken twenty lines, all quite ho-hum, to open on one fact: "The seamstresses are Irish." From then on, the poem rummages about in "human truths of survival and humiliation," to cite a keynote phrase from Object Lessons. The speaker imagines the exploited seamstresses working in gaslit backrooms, then suddenly switches to the communal "we": "We are bent over / / in a bad light. We are sewing a last / sight of shore. We are sewing coffin ships." The poem uses its final three stanzas to enlarge the diagram. As documentary and redress, this succeeds—it delivers information about injustice and sins of omission; as a poem, however, it founders with its cargo of uninflected fact. Chary of lyrical texture, the poem seems to prefer a threadbare line on moral grounds, recalling the epigraph from Plato.

Boland has her reasons for this approach, and she proclaims them clearly in Object Lessons, throwing gasoline on the embers of the old quarrel:

All good poetry depends on an ethical relation between imagination and image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths … No poetic imagination can afford to regard an image as a temporary aesthetic maneuver. Once the image is distorted, the truth is demeaned. That was the heart of it all as far as I was concerned.

It's as if Boland felt any melody or rhythm, any linguistic sensuality, would risk distorting the image of the seamstresses. The assertion that "good" poetry has an ethical dimension is always ripe for debate. One could plausibly claim that the great poems of the Western Tradition have always served, in part, an extra-aesthetic end. The Aeneid glorifies the founding of the Roman state, The Divine Comedy underwrites the theology of Aquinas, Paradise Lost justifies the ways of Milton's God to man. But the unwitting paradox in Boland's rather fundamentalist legislation is this: If there is no aesthetic maneuver, no love in the language, the image and poem will perish, doomed to be short-lived victims of their own occasion.

"Maneuver," surfacing through French from the Latin, originally meant "work done by hand," implying close, craftsmanly work as humble, laudable, and upstanding as seamstressing; but Boland turns this linguistic broadsword in the sun to flash only its connotations of adroit trickery and deception, bringing us back to Socrates' misgivings about melody, harmony, and rhythm. Second, by deferring "aesthetic maneuvers" in Section 4 of "Writing in a Time of Violence," Boland ensures that the poor seamstresses, propped up only as emblems, without nuance, will soon lapse back into oblivion. Of course, the poem's heart is in the right place. No one would begrudge the seamstresses our compassion as they labor in poor light to earn a paltry wage. But the language in which these women are depicted functions at minimal capacity, without the rich weave or visual vivacity that Boland can command.

A poem like "The Achill Woman," written to fit a curriculum, ends up bereft of stereoscopic depth. Pumped up and pushed forward in the memoirs, this poem from Outside History recounts Boland's Easter-vacation trip as a college student to Achill, on Ireland's rugged Atlantic coast, where she met a simple working woman (perhaps a response to Yeats' "Fisherman"). The humble, work-hardened Achill woman, as the story goes, brought a bucket of water up to Boland's waterless cottage each evening, and they would chat. This woman came to stand in Boland's mind as a figure for all those women either wholly unrepresented in the Irish poetic tradition or reduced to silent, two-dimensional ornaments. Boland describes the condition this way in Object Lessons:

The majority of Irish male poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry. They moved easily, deftly, as if by right among images of women in which I did not believe and of which I could not approve. The women in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status. This was especially true where the woman and the idea of the nation were mixed: where the nation became a woman and the woman took on a national posture.

The trouble was these images did good service as ornaments. In fact, they had a wide acceptance as ornaments by readers of Irish poetry. Women in such poems were frequently referred to approvingly as mythic, emblematic. But to me these passive and simplified women seemed a corruption. Moreover, the transaction they urged on the reader, to accept them as mere decoration, seemed to compound the corruption. For they were not decorations, they were not ornaments. However distorted these images, they had their roots in a suffered truth.

… It seemed to me a species of human insult that at the end of all, in certain Irish poems, they should become elements of style rather than aspects of truth.

Presented with this authoritative, just, and well-argued position, a reader comes to the poem itself with high expectations. Here is the beginning:

      She came up the hill carrying water.
      She wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan,
      a tea-towel round her waist.
 
      She pushed the hair out of her eyes with
      her free hand and put the bucket down.
 
      The zinc-music of the handle on the rim
      tuned the evening. An Easter moon rose.
      In the next-door field a stream was
      a fluid sunset; and then, stars.
 
      I remember the cold rosiness of her hands.
      She bent down and blew on them like broth.
      And round her waist, on a white background,
      in coarse, woven letters, the words "glass cloth."
 
      And she was nearly finished for the day.

This is all we see of the actual Achill woman. The lines are somewhat inert; aside from the "zinc-music" and "fluid sunset," they tread along in the literal, weighed down by structural parity ("She came …", "She wore …", "She pushed …", "She bent …", etc.). The drama is nonexistent, at least until the end, when Boland goes back into the cottage with her copy of the English court poets of the Silver Age (she is preparing for a college exam) and fails "to comprehend / the harmonies of servitude, / the grace music gives to flattery / and language borrows from ambition." Raleigh, one of those court poets (and sponsored by a queen), may have been a colonizer and tobacco advocate, but he, too, like the Achill Woman, knew a bit about truth and suffering. (Fifteen years in the Tower of London and death by execution should earn him some sympathy!) As for music and grace in language, need we damn them out of hand because of their historical association with the flattery and ambitions of Court life? One might just as well, then, abjure language altogether. "The Achill Woman" shows Boland moving closer to life for her inspiration, yet one would have hoped for more from the poem as poem. While its intentions are commendable, the argument is a bit too assured in the comfort of its affiliations.

At other points the poetry falls out of step with the ethical marching orders. An earlier and notorious poem entitled "Mastectomy" succeeds lyrically with its spare, haunting, oracular tercets, but all is spoiled at the end—if measured against Boland's benchmark—when the speaker blames male doctors for her loss:

     So they have taken off
     what slaked them first,
     what they have hated since:
 
     blue-veined
     white-domed
     home
 
     of wonder
     and the wetness
     of their dreams.
 
     I flatten
     to their looting,
     to the sleight
 
     of their plunder.
     I am a brute site.
     Theirs is the true booty.
                         (from In Her Own Image, 1980)

Boland's moral authority doesn't live here. What, one wonders, has happened to the ethical dimension? Not only has the speaker failed to consider that the surgeon has saved her life (and holds a scarred human being more valuable than a cancer-ridden female sex object), but the speaker has also committed the sacrilege of reducing her own breasts to erotic objects upon which her sense of self depends.

The eponymous final section of "Writing in a Time of Violence" does greater justice to reality. In a complex gesture that refuses the stylish answer, Boland unloads bombs over "sweet euphony" and rhetoric in a poem both lyrical and rhetorical. She distinguishes language from the Art of Rhetoric, the former being the hero-in-hiding of genuine expression, the latter the blameworthy art of verbal trickery. It begins this way:

     In my last year in College
     I set out
     to write an essay on
     the Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find
 
     the country already lost to me
     in song and figure as I scribbled down
     names for sweet euphony
     and safe digression.
 
     And when I came to the word insinuate
     I saw that language could writhe and creep
     and the lore of snakes
     which I had learned as a child not to fear—
     because the Saint had sent them out of Ireland—
     came nearer.
 
     Chiasmus, Litotes, Periphrasis. Old
     indices and agents of persuasion. How
     I remember them …

When Stephen Dedalus, who also studied rhetoric and aesthetics, invokes the Father at the end of Portrait of the Artist, he does so with bittersweet fondness, knowing the necessity of artifice: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." But when Boland echoes that invocation, with "Old indices and agents of persuasion," it is as a looking back to a Fatherly art that has deceived her by painting over atrocities and agendas—an art behind which Boland no longer intends to hide.

Addressing both her current self and the increasingly wary college girl she was, Boland draws the line between language and the con-game of rhetoric: "we will live, we have lived / where language is concealed … / We will be—we have been—citizens / of its hiding place." But, Boland concludes, it is too late to ignore or deny the tenure of public, political, and literary rhetoric. She makes this point in a sentence that ventures out excitingly to the edge of syntactic control:

                                  … But it is too late
 
     to shut the book of satin phrases,
     to refuse to enter
     an evening bitter with peat smoke,
     where newspaper sellers shout headlines
     and friends call out their farewells in
     a city of whispers
     and interiors 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.

In one sense, this can be construed as a requiem for postlapsarian language, a medium whose sensuality is not to be trusted, where in every carefully wrought stone wall a snake waits to strike. Boland's specific premise is that, in a world as politicized as her Ireland, and for an Irish woman poet struggling to emerge in a predominantly male tradition, beautiful speech is not enough. Even satin phrases and sweet euphony—the whispers, the interiors, the dear vowels partake of the euphonious—are judged guilty by their association with public, political rhetoric, with "hate and territory and the like." Implying that the rhetorical and the dulcet both must be held for questioning in a time of violence, Boland honestly—and, for a poet, painfully—subpoenas the distinguishing powers of her art, coming full circle back to Socrates. She questions the poet's ways and means and implies the need for an ethical trellis up which the poetry must be trained. The adventure of reading Boland lies in watching her poetry, at its best, overwhelm the latticework.

"The Singers" is such a poem. It is dedicated to "M. R.," presumably Mary Robinson, the President of Ireland and one of Boland's most eminent admirers. (Robinson shares with Boland a characteristic mask, described by Declan Kiberd in his vast, new historical survey Inventing Ireland as that of a "classic Irish radical in deceptively conservative clothing.") "The Singers" goes forth with clear conscience, striding past Socrates with no second thought, and no homiletics. Yet it effortlessly fulfills both its duties, being in and out of its right mind:

       The women who were singers in the West
       lived on an unforgiving coast.
       I want to ask was there ever one
       moment when all of it relented,
       when rain and ocean and their own
       sense of home were revealed to them
       as one and the same?
 
                                              After which
       every day was still shaped by weather,
       but every night their mouths filled with
       Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars
       and exhausted birds.
 
                               And only when the danger
       was plain in the music could you know
       their true measure of rejoicing in
 
       finding a voice where they found a vision.

If Socrates haunts these lines, it is not the forbidding censor of the Republic but the thinker of Ion looking enviously to the divine madness of good poets, who "compose their beautiful poems … because they are inspired and possessed," who are necessarily "not in their right minds" as they abandon themselves to the divine agents of music and meter.

Because Boland here allows herself this abandon, the unspecified women of the poem, and the poem itself, are rendered more memorable. The predicament of these "women who were singers in the West" is indeed "plain in the music." It's the difference between the prosaic chronicle, tethered to history and time, and the oracle, who speaks regardless of either. These lines, for instance, in the chronicle mode, merely allocate data:

    Two women
    were standing in shadow,
    one with her back turned.
    Their talk was a gesture,
    an outstretched hand.
 
    They talked to each other,
    and words like "summer,"
    "birth," "great-grandmother"
    kept pleading with me,
    urging me to follow.
       (from "The Oral Tradition," Outside History)

In contrast, the lines that open "The Singers" are alive with both oracular energy and sonic significance:

     The women who were singers in the West
     lived on an unforgiving coast.

These two lines do more than all ten quoted above. Working against the clear iambic suggestion set up by the first line, the harsher, foreshortened second suggests the rigors of the place: The abrupt, initial stress ("lived") and the final two consonantal stresses of "unforgiving coast" are rugged in their sound.

These women convey their measure of rejoicing in the vigor of the language; moreover, their rejoicing stems from finding a voice and vision that occur in the imaginative order, where each night "their mouths filled with / Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars / and exhausted birds." Human anguish presented in this oracular fashion—closer to the root of the lyric—will weather time better than sufferings merely chronicled. In fulfilling its double mandate, this poem abides by Aristotle's good horse sense from Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics: "The excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy."

The same may be said for the trend of Boland's more recent work, after 1987, as represented in Part I of Outside History and In a Time of Violence. In the former sits quietly, potently, one of Boland's most striking poems. "What Love Intended" is a suburban elegy, though it requires no campaigning or pronouncements. The conviction of its own legitimacy runs deep in the music and cadences of the lines. It demands to be quoted in its entirety, as tribute to Boland at her best:

        I can imagine if
      I came back again,
        looking through windows at
 
        broken mirrors, pictures,
      and, in the cracked upstairs,
        the beds where it all began.
 
        The suburb in the rain
      this October morning
        full of food and children
 
        and animals, will be—
      when I come back again—
        gone to wrack and ruin.
 
        I will be its ghost,
      its revenant, discovering
        again in one place
 
        the history of my pain,
      my ordeal, my grace,
        unable to resist
 
        seeing what is past,
      judging what has ended
        and whether, first to last,
 
        from then to now and even
      here, ruined, this
        is what love intended—
 
        finding even the yellow
      jasmine in the dusk,
        the smell of early dinners,
 
        the voices of our children,
      taking turns and quarreling,
        burned on the distance,
 
        gone. And the small square
      where under cropped lime
        and poplar, on bicycles
 
        and skates in the summer,
      they played until dark;
        propitiating time.
 
        And even the two whitebeams
      outside the house gone,
        with the next-door neighbor
 
        who used to say in April—
      when one was slow to bloom—
        they were a man and woman.

This is masterful music. Boland does indeed make time "turn and wander" as she brings about that powerful, coveted "meeting between a hidden life and a hidden chance in language." The cadences are charged with elegiac love, not retributive ire. The diction is simple, but the words are carried in continuums of syntax that wind through the spare tercets with forceful elegance, sounding quiet off-rhymes at many of the turns to create a subtle, unprogrammed, but definite and sensuous echo. Boland conducts this score for one of her central themes: the ordinary, secret, uncelebrated life of a woman's suburban Dublin. The poem is all the more resonant for not getting bogged down in geographical particulars. At the end it gently but vastly opens out toward the mythic, its final line suggesting Ovid's faithful old couple, Baucis and Philemon, transformed together, by gods who loved them, into an oak and a linden tree in the Phrygian hills.

Boland again mines the Tradition's classical legends in "The Pomegranate," from In a Time of Violence. She appropriates the myth of Ceres and Persephone to explore the primal maternal love for a daughter and the ineluctable role reversal of child and parent. For the sake of space, I restrict myself to the first fourteen lines:

     The only legend I have ever loved is
     The story of a daughter lost in hell.
     And found and rescued there.
     Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
     Ceres and Persephone the names.
     And the best thing about the legend is
     I can enter it anywhere. And have.
     As a child in exile in
     A city of fogs and strange consonants,
     I read it first and at first I was
     An exiled child in the crackling dusk of
     The underworld, the stars blighted. Later
     I walked out in a summer twilight
     Searching for my daughter at bedtime.

The lines, stretched taut, defy the ear to ignore them. Their integrity dwells in several dimensions: an emotional necessity expressed so perfectly in a rhythm that the line is irrefutable and timeless ("The only legend I have ever loved is / The story of a daughter lost in hell"); an evocative mingling of image with abstract association ("A city of fogs and strange consonants"); and a deceptively relaxed, depressurized line enriched by the music of its vowels and mournful falling rhythms ("I walked out in a summer twilight / Searching for my daughter at bedtime.") It's telling that here, as in many of her most intimate poems (as opposed to her stance pieces), Boland waives Socrates and paroles sweet euphony to go out and ravish the reader's willing ear.

In another memorable poem, "The Water Clock," Boland swan-dives into the purely lyrical:

    Thinking of ageing on a summer day
            of rain and more rain
    I took a book down from a shelf
            and stopped to read
    and found myself—
            how did it happen?—
             reflecting on
    the absurd creation of the water clock.

The first sentence, draped through eight lines, sparkles with classical clarity, poised at a sagacious distance from the world's wearisome political posturing. It maintains its imaginative elevation and complexity, working the image of the clepsydra, rather than collapsing into boilerplate rant. Boland continues to wonder about time's passing in "Anna Liffey," which ruminates as much on the river through Dublin as on Boland's own history as woman, mother, and poet. With poignant wisdom and a degree of divulgence unseen in her poetry till now, Boland says outright:

     In the end
     It will not matter
     That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
     The body is a source. Nothing more.
     There is a time for it. There is a certainty
     About the way it seeks its own dissolution.

She goes even further toward revelation, lofted clear of contemporary orthodoxies:

     When language cannot do it for us,
     Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,
     There are these phrases
     of the ocean
     To console us.
     Particular and unafraid of their completion.
     In the end
     Everything that burdened and distinguished me
     Will be lost in this:
     I was a voice.

And the linguistic characteristics of that voice, its textures and persuasive melodies, will be its key to survival.

While Boland still distrusts "the high-minded search for euphony," she nonetheless can sustain a superbly lyrical line, and it does not diminish her or us. It comes through clear as she praises the Liffey, "Spirit of water, / Spirit of place":

     Its clarity as it flows,
     In the company of runt flowers and herons,
     Around a bend at Islandbridge
     And under thirteen bridges to the sea.
     Its patience at twilight—
     Swans nesting by it,
     Neon wincing into it.

Initiated in the consoling secrets of "these phrases of the ocean," the lines are more time-defying than a paragraph of deliberative oratory. These are the strains that set free the mermaid, the shepherdess, and Cassiopeia.

Boland knows that one need not smash the cello in favor of the horn: All resources are required to record and orchestrate the unrecorded life. If we judge from the textures of her newest poems, Boland is turning more fully now toward song. Even Socrates, in prison and preparing to die, gives in to a dream calling him to practice "the art." Boland, versed in the classics, is not unaware of this. Left behind as all writings are bound to be in time's democratic Circus Maximus, her poems will stand or fall—I suspect they will stand—not on the politics that burdens and distinguishes them for now but on the hardihood of their afterlife as a lyrical voice.