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Beloved Irish poet Eavan Boland Eavan Boland, one of the greatest of Irish contemporary poets, died six years ago at the age of 75 at her Dublin home. Her prolific body of work wrestled with often thorny issues of Irish identity and insisted on the recognition of the role of women including their domestic situations. It became so central to the conversation about evolving modern Ireland that her poems are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate, the final exam of secondary students required for admission to a college or university. Mary Robinson selected her to read a poem at her 1990 inauguration as the first woman President of Éire and Barack Obama quoted her at a White House St. Patrick’s Day reception. Eavan Frances Boland was born on September 24, 1944 in Dublin to career diplomat Frederick Boland and his wife, noted painter Frances Kelly. When she was six in 1950 her father was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom, the most important Irish diplomatic post at a time when relations between the country were tense over Ireland’s neutrality during World War II and continuing claims on Northern Ireland. As a child in London she first experienced anti-Irish sentiment strengthening her identification with her Irish heritage which she later described in her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.  At 14, she returned to Dublin to attend Holy Child School in Killiney and them Trinity College where she was a classmate of Mary Robinson and where she published a first pamphlet 23 Poems in 1962. She earned her BA with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from Trinity in 1966. She held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, prose criticism, and essays. Boland married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969 and had two daughters. Her experiences as a wife and mother influenced her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes.  She taught at Trinity College, University College, Dublin, and Bowdoin College in Main, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at Trinity and at the National Maternity Hospital. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she was a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University and divided her time between Palo Alto, and her home in Dublin. Boland’s first book of poetry was New Territory published in 1965 followed by The War Horse in 1975, In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.  Boland reading in a pub. She published dozens of collections most recently Eavan Boland: A Poet’s Dublin edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph and A Woman Without A Country both in 2014. Boland’s many honors and awards on both sides of the Atlantic are too numerous to mention. Her work best speaks for itself. My friend and radical poet Jerry Pendergast selected this apt poem about the Irish famine and the typhoid epidemic that accompanied it to remember Boland. Quarantine In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking—they were both walking—north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived. In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her. Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory: Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved. —Eavan Boland  This one cuts to the quick of shame and guilt. Domestic Violence 1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. And there was a couple who quarreled into the night, Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely right in the lives of those who love each other. 2. In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too. We stood there wondering how the salt horizons and the Dublin hills, the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes we thought we knew had been made to shiver into our ancient twelve by fifteen television which gave them back as gray and grayer tears and killings, killings, killings, then moonlight-colored funerals: nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other. 3. And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done? 4. We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one. Children were born and raised here and are gone, including ours. As for that couple did we ever find out who they were and did we want to? I think we know. I think we always knew. —Eavan Boland  Finally, one on the complex interactions of history, the natural world, love, and art. How We Made New Art on Old Ground A famous battle happened in this valley. You never understood the nature poem. Till now. Till this moment—if these statements seem separate, unrelated, follow this silence to its edge and you will hear the history of air: the crispness of a fern or the upward cut and turn around of a fieldfare or thrush written on it. The other history is silent: The estuary is over there. The issue was decided here: Two kings prepared to give no quarter. Then one king and one dead tradition. Now the humid dusk, the old wounds wait for language, for a different truth: When you see the silk of the willow and the wider edge of the river turn and grow dark and then darker, then you will know that the nature poem is not the action nor its end: it is this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet, on the steering wheel shaft: it is an aftermath, an overlay and even in its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen And as I write valley straw, metal blood, oaths, armour are unwritten. Silence spreads slowly from these words to those ilex trees half in, half out of shadows falling on the shallow ford of the south bank beside Yellow Island as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion begins to be complete: what we see is what the poem says: evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and when bushes and a change of weather about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are for this moment free of one another. —Eavan Boland |
