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Beloved Irish poet Eavan Boland
Ireland is deeply mourning loss of Eavan
Boland one of the greatest of her contemporary
poets who died yesterday 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 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 to 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 which strengthened
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.
Since then 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
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Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Eavan Boland—National Poetry Month 2020
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