A nA n

E a v a n B o l a n d E a v a n B o l a n d

S o u r c e P a c k e tS o u r c e P a c k e t

I B A 1 E N G L I S HI B A 1 E N G L I S H

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IT’S A WOMAN’S WORLD

BIOGRAPHY

Eavan Aisling Boland was born September 24, 1944, in Dublin, Ireland. The daughter of Frederick H. Boland, a diplomat, and Frances Kelly, a painter, Boland grew up in Dublin, London, and New York City. In 1966, she graduated with honors from Trinity College in Dublin, where she later was a lecturer in the English department. From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, Boland worked as a cultural journalist, writing reviews for the arts section of the Irish Times and other publications. Since the 1980s, Boland has taught at several colleges in the United States and Ireland, including Bowdoin College, Washington University, University College Dublin, and Stanford University. Since 1995, she has been the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and director of the creative writing program at Stanford.

In 1967, Boland published a collection of poems titled New Territory. Boland has since published ten poetry collections, including The War Horse (1975), Night Feed (1982), Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980 – 1990 (1990), An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967 – 1987 (1996), and Against Love Poetry: Poems (2001). "It's a Woman's World appears in Night Feed.

Boland has also published volumes of prose, including Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995) and A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (1989). She coauthored a biography of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats and His World (1998), and has edited several anthologies, including, with the American poet Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000).

Boland has received many distinguished awards, such as the 1994 Lannan Award for poetry, Poetry magazine's 2002 Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, and the Yale Review's Smartt Family Prize for Against Love Poetry.

An Irish Childhood in England: 1951

The bickering of vowels on the buses, !the clicking thumbs and the big hips of !the navy-skirted ticket collectors with !their crooked seams brought it home to me: !Exile. Ration-book pudding. !Bowls of dripping and the fixed smile ! of the school pianist playing "Iolanthe," !"Land of Hope and Glory" !and "John Peel." I didn't know what to hold, to keep. ! At night, filled with some malaise !of love for what I'd never known I had, I fell asleep and let the moment pass The passing moment has become a night of clipped shadows, freshly painted houses, the garden eddying in the dark and heat,

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my children half-awake, half-asleep.

Airless, humid dark. Leaf-noise. The stirrings of a garden before rain. A hint of the storm behind the risen moon. A hint of storm behind the risen moon. ! We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to?-- in a strange city, in another country, on nights in a north-facing bedroom, !waiting for the sleep that never did restore me as I'd hoped to what I'd lost- let the world I knew become the space !between the words that I had by heart !and all the other speech that always was ! becoming the language of the country that I came to in nineteen fifty-one: ! barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old, !overdressed and sick on the plane when all of England to an Irish child was nothing more than what you'd lost and how: ! was the teacher in the London convent who when I produced 'I amn't' in the classroom !turned and said- 'You're not in Ireland now.'

In this poem Boland describes her struggle to hold on to what she never really knew about Ireland. She writes, “I didn’t know what to hold, to keep./At night, filled with some malaise of love for what I’d never known I had,/I fell asleep and let the

moment pass” (Boland, 1987, 10-13). Boland doesn’t know what to hold on to and so she allows her mind to think of other things, current things, to fill that moment. She writes, “We are what we have chosen” but then she wonders if she really chose to “let the world I knew become the space/between the words that I had by heart/and all the other speech that always was/becoming the language of the country that/I came to in nineteen-fifty-one” (Boland, 1987, 21,26-30). She doesn’t believe that she chose to have her whole world changed by all the words and lessons she was taught in England. She doesn’t know if she can believe that she had a choice in changing who she was in order to survive in England. We see this more clearly when she explains that “all of England to an Irish child/was nothing more that what you’d lost and how/…when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom/[the teacher] turned and said – “you’re not in Ireland now”” (Boland, 1987, 33-34,36-37). Boland questions if she really had a choice as to who she was going to be when she came to England as a little girl.

IslanIslands Apart: A Notebook ds Apart: A Notebook by Eavan Boland I live in Dublin and California. In both places, on both sets of shelves, I keep the same book. It was published in Ireland in the twenties. Like anyone with a similar passion, I’ve given up asking people if they have read it — or asking those who have read it if they remember it. The book is called The Hidden Ireland. It’s about a townland in Ireland called Sliabh Luachra, a mountainy, rushy district on the Cork-Kerry border. In the eighteenth century it was the home of native-speaking Irish poets such as Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin. The book tracks their struggle in a dark time. The author was Daniel Corkery. He was a fierce, contrarian writer from Cork, born in 1878. He regarded Yeats and Lady Gregory with an equal and angry suspicion. He rejected the Irish Revival. “Though we may think of this literature as a homogeneous thing,” he wrote

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plaintively, “we cannot think of it as an indigenous thing.” The Hidden Ireland is an unrepentant elegy for that “indigenous thing.” He mourns and celebrates those hard-pressed, Irish-speaking poets of the eighteenth century. He looks back to their dying language, to the lost Gaelic order and writes with a scalding bitterness about that loss. When I was a teenager, trying to hear other voices, I heard his. Now, when I go back to Ireland and see the new prosperity there, I still hear that voice. Maybe no passage when I was young — not Synge, not Joyce, not even Yeats — moved me more than his furious insistence that a group of ruined Irish poets could remain an inspiration:

In reading those poets, then, we are to keep in mind, first, that the nature of the poetry depends on the district in which it was written — if in Munster, it is literary in its nature; if in Ulster or Connacht, it has the simple directness of folk-song. Then we must also remember that the poets were simple men, living as peasants in rural surroundings; some of them, probably, never saw a city; not only this, but they were all poor men, very often sore-troubled where and how to find shelter, clothing, food, at the end of a day’s tramping. Their native culture is ancient, harking back to pre-Renaissance standards; but there is no inflow of books from outside to impregnate it with new thoughts. Their language is dying: around them is the drip, drip of callous decay: famine overtakes famine, or the people are cleared from the land to make room for bullocks. The rocks in hidden mountain clefts are the only altars left to them; and teaching is a felony. Not to excuse, but to explain them, are these facts mentioned; for their poetry, though doubtless the poorest chapter in the book of Irish literature, is in itself no poor thing that needs excuse: it is, contrariwise, a rich thing, a marvelous inheritance, bright with music, flushed with color, deep with human feeling. To see it against the dark world that threw it up is to be astonished, if not dazzled.

* * * Who exactly is a poet? How do we recognize one, even when circumstances seem to deny the possibility of such an existence? Once I thought Corkery had the answer. Now it looks far less simple. When I try to think these days about what Corkery meant, I keep colliding into other definitions. Nothing about the poet’s identity or survival looks as clear as it did when I first read The Hidden Ireland. And of course nothing looks as singular. It seems to me now there are many definitions of the poet — some of them contradictory to each other. Maybe it’s that I live in two places, or went to school in different countries, or come from an island where two languages produced two very different versions of the poet — whatever it is, these ideas of the poet’s identity and existence keep coming to me, keep asking for a clearer definition. And if I can’t exactly provide it, I still keep thinking I should try.

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Boland in ConversationBoland in Conversation Below is an interview conducted by Elizabeth Schmidt in 2001, the editor of the literary magazine, Open City, and writer at The New Yorker magazine. Accordingly, Boland's views on feminism, her works, and life are portrayed. Elizabeth Schmidt: As a poet who has been involved in both Irish and American poetry communities, do you see many differences between the two? Similarities? In which world do you feel most at home?

Eavan Boland: Of course they're alike in some ways. But I notice the differences more than the similarities. They're separated, as poetry worlds, by their history and by their heritage. The Irish poetry world when I first knew it still had nineteenth century shadows on it. It was a small, unified, intense community, whose references to the past were a common language. The American poetry world is so much larger, more diverse. The common references are much less obvious, at least to an Irish poet. In terms of feeling at home, of course I feel at home in Ireland because I am at home there. But I sought out American poetry because of that powerful, inclusive diversity. I always remember I'm an Irish poet there, but at the same time some part of my sense of poetry feels very confirmed by the American achievement.

Schmidt: Is it possible to talk generally about how contemporary American poetry differs from contemporary Irish poetry? And more particularly, do you see a difference in how poets in each country are writing lyric poetry? By "Lyric" I have in mind Charles Simic's recent statement that only the finest lyric poems communicate "the experience of the naked moment," that they are the only poems that leave "a lasting record of our naked humanity."

Boland: The contemporary differences go back, as I've just remarked, to some of the historic ones. It's very hard, even for a contemporary lyric poetry, to escape history. And the differences there are really striking. Irish poetry has a bardic history. The Irish bards lay down in darkness to compose. They wrote poems to their patrons that ranged from christening odes to the darkest invective. They were poets who were shaped by an oral culture and you only have to read a book like Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland to know that long after they were abandoned by history at the end of the eighteenth century, long after their language was destroyed, they were remembered and quoted in Ireland. The drama of all that still backlights Irish poetry--the painful memory of a poetry whose archive was its audience. There is a sort of communal aspect to the identity of the Irish poet even now that has an effect on the contemporary Irish lyric. American poetry, on the other hand, seems to me very tied in with the rise of literacy. As soon as it existed it was read. Of course there are other poetries--I'm thinking of the Harlem Renaissance in particular--where I think the background is more similar to the Irish one, and more oral. But the American poet who traces a descent from Whitman or Dickinson--I know this is a simplified diagram--doesn't have the intense oral, communal past to contend with. They have the exciting sense of a new language, not an old or mortgaged one. So I think, in comments made by Irish and American poets, you have this contrast where the American poet can feel isolated, and the Irish poet oppressed by the communal shadows that fall across the poem. It cuts both ways. Irish poetry draws strength from the bardic past. American poetry seems to me to have benefited, obliquely and maybe painfully, from that felt isolation of the American poet, because it has resulted in that tradition of experiment I admire so much. Irish poetry couldn't have produced a Wallace Stevens. On the other hand, those communal tensions worked well to goad William Yeats into poetry, and kept goading him to the very end of his life. So back to your question on the contemporary lyric. The Irish lyric poem is often strong, eloquent, accessible. It's the lingua franca of Irish poetry. But it's not experimental enough, in my view. Its ties to the old communal obligations of Irish poetry don't help it. The American lyric poem, on the other hand, has been experimental from the start. Look at Dickinson. She was instantly subversive in her lyric.

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Schmidt: Having taught in Ireland and America, do you find differences in the way emerging poets write in each country? In how they work at becoming poets?

Boland: Travel and communication have definitely changed things. The gulf between poetic communities like Ireland and America is not as wide as it once was. I think there are real differences, but maybe less than there once were. There are starting to be workshops and creative writing degrees in Ireland. Trinity College started one for the first time this year, for instance. Young poets in both places are probably going to have more in common than they used to. But those differences of history can be seen here as well. Emerging Irish poets tend to feel at the center of things in Ireland. They give readings which are well attended. The poetry and writing festivals are lively and warm and very communally based. I think their equivalents in America feel that chill of isolation, not so much personally as through the impersonal sense that they are not quite certain where they stand with their society. Becoming a poet is not easy in either country, but maybe in Ireland it's still a less isolated process than in the States. Then again, at Stanford I teach the Stegner Fellows, which is a very distinctive and rewarding thing for anyone. These are very serious, very gifted poets, on a Fellowship that gives them the shelter of time at the very moment when they're preparing a first book. That's wonderful for me--it enables me to have a conversation about poetry which I particularly value, and couldn't have in that way in Ireland.

Schmidt: How has physically bridging two cultures--teaching in California, maintaining a home in Ireland--affected your own work? Has being removed, in a day-to-day way, from Ireland changed the way you compose poems? The way you come across inspiration for a poem? The imagery that's available to you?

Boland: It's not location, I think, that changes poems or poets. It's where they are in their own work, what impasse or forward movement is there, that makes the difference. For a long time, I've had a sort of dialogue going on in my mind--maybe even a quarrel--between those elements of poetic experiment and bardic inheritance. The tension is in my own work, and it's not where I am that adds or subtracts from it, but what I'm writing. I may outwardly bridge cultures as you say, but inwardly as a poet I stay in the same place I've always been, just trying to move from the unfinished business of one poem to the next.

Schmidt: You mentioned the lyric is the lingua franca of Irish poetry. To what extent do you feel, if at all, that your ideas about feminism--the way those ideas have infused your work--have created a transnational poetics, a sort of lingua franca that addresses, for example, the domestic visions that women of a certain class everywhere can share?

Boland: I'm a feminist. I'm not a feminist poet. I've said somewhere else that I think feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic. My poetry begins for me where certainty ends. I think the imagination is an ambiguous and untidy place, and its frontiers are not accessible to the logic of feminism for that reason. So I don't really think it's created that poetics you speak of, in exactly that way. Where feminism has influenced and anchored my view of things is in the making of a critique. And it's one of the things I'm most uneasy about, looking back: that so much women's poetry

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pre-existed that critique. I think it needs a critique. Feminism is certainly a part of a book like Object Lessons.

Schmidt: Perhaps the notion of a "transnational poetics" conveys a sense of the generic that contradicts the intense feeling of place in your poems. Can you describe the process by which the particular and the intimate become paradoxically emblematic, if that's the right word, and therefore accessible?

Boland: Eliot has an interesting essay on Baudelaire that touches on this. He's writing about the way Baudelaire pioneered certain kinds of urban reference and imagery, certain ways of talking about the rain and dirt and downright squalor of a city. Then he stops and says--well, it isn't because he wrote about those images of the city; it's because (he says) Baudelaire raised them "to the first intensity" that they matter. And of course, that's what any poet writing about a particular place wants to do: to transform it, not just catalogue it. When I was in a suburb in Dublin, at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, surrounded every day by the same rowan trees and distances, I wanted to convey not just a place, but the sort of bodily knowledge I got from place.

Schmidt: In your books of poems and certainly in your autobiographical prose, certain ordinary images are repeated and lingered upon. Is this a way of making the ordinary emblematic?

Boland: It wasn't that much of a strategy. I just wanted to find a way of conveying how things change from the ordinary to the familiar, from the familiar to the known, from the known to the visionary. How the same thing can be seen differently over and over again. I was in a flat in Dublin when I was a student for a few years. It had a table in one room, a window over a garden. There was nothing remarkable about any of it, except that remarkable things happened to me there--I wrote my first real poems in that room and began to believe and hope I was a poet there. When you go back to find those feelings in memory, you can often only draw the map in terms of place and it has to be the perceived place, not the actual one. The way a room looked, for instance, the hour after you wrote your first sturdy poem in it.

Schmidt: In Object Lessons you mention reading Sylvia Plath at an early age, and later Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. Is it possible to say something more about how each poet's work has influenced your own, and if their work shares qualities you see as either especially "American" or "feminine"?

Boland: It's an interesting question. Each of those poets has been very important to me. Each of them leads me back into the American poetry they were nourished by, and departed from, and returned to in certain ways. I can see Whitman better through Adrienne Rich at times, than I can through some of his own poetry. I wish a more exact and exacting critique had been made for Sylvia Plath. I think she was an American surrealist and is a too often discussed as a character in an American melodrama. Bishop interests me so much because she opened this fascinating space between voice and tone: her tone was so talky and throwaway in her poems. Her voice was so dark, so achieved. The poem you hear happens in the space between those two. Did she do that because she was American, feminine, a formalist who de-stabilized forms by using them in new contexts? All of the above, I'm sure. So it's hard to make the lines and draw the boundaries. They're also precious to me, I won't deny it, because they opened the identity of the poet up for me. They made that identity include their womanhood, and they found ways to explore and articulate their womanhood through that identity. One of the reasons I feel so confirmed by some of what has happened in American poetry is because of them. I found the courage to be a poet in Ireland and it was a given that I was an Irish woman. But they gave me the courage to believe that one identity need not limit or edit the other.

Schmidt: Do you feel that the intense discipline and technical mastery you concentrated on as a young poet was a necessary stage on the way to writing "the full report of the reality conveyed" to you? Do you feel that learning to write in particular forms helped you find the

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form that truly matched the later poem's inspiration? Or do you see those years of striving to write in a more traditionally Irish voice as some kind of false start?

Boland: No, definitely not a false start. Every young poet, to some extent, writes the poem in the air. And a certain kind of formal, well-structured poem was around me in the air when I was young. I laboured to write it, and I learned to write it. And for part of that time it was certainly someone else's poem I was learning and labouring to write. But an apprenticeship in poetry, like in any other craft or art, is not necessarily a journey in self-discovery. I struggled with issues of the line and the voice in those forms. I learned a lot.

Schmidt: Reading your autobiographical prose, it is possible to see your growth as a poet in cycles--from working at mastering traditional forms to working to find "that true meeting between a hidden life and a hidden language out of which true form would come--the form of a true poem?" Would you describe how two quite different recent poems, "The Pomegranate" and "Lava Cameo," reflect this growth? How did you approach writing each poem?

Boland: They're both important poems to me. "Lava Cameo" was written relatively quickly; "The Pomegranate" took almost a year. Yeats has an interesting essay on the different kinds of time in poetry, how English poems are meditative--he says they may be like "The Thames Valley"--whereas Irish poetry has a sort of crisis time. I think there's truth in that. "Lava Cameo" is about my grandmother and tries to compress a lost life into an image of something ambiguous--a profile cut on volcanic rock. I can still see the antique stall where I first saw a lava cameo. But the stanzas I used--fairly open, dissociated stanzas, capable of covering ground and changing voices--were something I could manage at that time. "The Pomegranate" was less easy. It's very easy to get a time fault in a narrative poem like that. By time fault, I just mean that the poem can go quicker in some places and slower in others. I had to struggle with syntax all the time, and go back, and go back again to get the consistency I needed. I've often thought that there's a difference between revision and re-writing. Revision is brisk and business-like. Re-writing can become addictive. You start again and start again. "The Pomegranate" seemed for months like a poem I was re-writing. Then eventually I went back to it, and picked up something that felt like a tune, and worked along with that. It's an important poem to me. It widens out to include things I loved and wanted to bring together: my teenage daughter, Sarah, asleep in a room full of magazines and Coke cans and cut apple. In other words, the disorganization of the beloved moment. And then that fearless, organized structure which is legend. I just wanted to introduce them to each other in the poem, the way they were already connected in my mind. This poem reflects Boland’s insistence on feminism as well as her Irish nationalism. Consequently, the daughter and mother have several roles symbolically. In terms of feminism, the mother states how the daughter is becoming stronger, wiser, more assertive, and most importantly, more independent. Therefore, the mother’s metaphor of “winter [being] in store for every leaf on every tree…” regarding to how she was ready to “make any bargain to keep [the daughter]” foreshadows her daughter’s gateway into adulthood and independence as she is able to survive by eating a pomegranate. Thus, the daughter picks the pomegranate as opposed to “[the mother’s] heart-breaking search.” Likewise, the daughter and mother symbolize Ireland and its motherland, England. Consequently, the mother laments about her daughter’s feminism and independence. This in turn, symbolizes the national tension and constant struggle between Ireland and England over the Irish’s attempts to gain independence. The mother, also known as England, acknowledges how “the legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up.” Thus, England admits to the inevitability of Ireland’s passion for freedom, happiness, and justice. Similar to a daughter growing up, England admits that once Ireland changes, the daughter’s fate of rebellion and freedom is inevitable. Like the mother, the daughter uses legend to restore history which symbolizes Ireland restoring its history and state.

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It's A Woman's World

Our way of life has hardly changed since a wheel first whetted a knife. Maybe flame burns more greedily and wheels are steadier, but we're the same: who milestone our lives with oversights, living by the lights of the loaf left by the cash register, the washing powder paid for and wrapped, the wash left wet: like most historic peoples we are defined by what we forget, by what we never will be- star-gazers, fire-eaters. It's our alibi for all time: as far as history goes we were never on the scene of the crime. When the king's head gored its basket- grim harvest- we were gristing bread or getting the recipe for a good soup to appetize our gossip. It's still the same: By night our windows moth our children to the flame of hearth not history. And still no page scores the low music

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of our outrage. Appearances still reassure: that woman there, craned to the starry mystery, is merely getting a breath of evening air. While this one here- her mouth a burning plume - she's no fire-eater, just my frosty neighbour coming home.

pomegranate c.1320, poumgarnet, from O.Fr. pome grenate, from M.L. pomum granatum, lit. "apple with many seeds," from pome "apple, fruit" + grenate "having grains," from L. granata, fem. of granatus, from granum "grain." The L. was malum granatum "seeded apple." It. form is granata, Sp. is granada.

Etymology

The name "pomegranate" derives from Latin pomum ("apple") and granatus ("seeded"). This has influenced the common name for pomegranate in many languages (e.g. German Granatapfel, seeded apple). The genus name Punica is named for the Phoenicians, who were active in broadening its cultivation, partly for religious reasons. In classical Latin, where "malum" was broadly applied to many apple-like fruits, the pomegranate's name was malum punicum or malum granatum, the latter giving rise to the Italian name melograno, or less commonly melagrana.

A separate, widespread root for "pomegranate" comes from the Ancient Egyptian rmn, from which derive the Hebrew rimmôn, and Arabic rummân. This root was given by Arabs to other languages, including Portuguese (romã)[3], Kabyle rrumman and Maltese "rummien". The pomegranate ('rimmôn') is mentioned in the Bible as one of the seven fruits/plants that Israel was blessed with, and in Hebrew, 'rimmôn' is

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also the name of the weapon now called the grenade. According to the OED, the word grenade originated about 1532 from the French name for the pomegranate, la grenade. La grenade also gives us the word grenadine, the name of a kind of fruit syrup, originally made from pomegranates, which is widely used as a cordial and in cocktails.

The myth of Persephone, the dark goddess of the Underworld, also prominently features the pomegranate. In one version of Greek mythology, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken off to live in the underworld as his wife. Her mother, Demeter (goddess of the Harvest), went into mourning for her lost daughter and thus all green things ceased to grow. Zeus, the highest ranking of the Greek gods, could not leave the Earth to die, so he commanded Hades to return Persephone. It was the rule of the Fates that anyone who consumed food or drink in the Underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Persephone had no food, but Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds while she was still his prisoner and so, because of this, she was condemned to spend four months in the Underworld every year. During these four months, when Persephone is sitting on the throne of the Underworld next to her husband Hades, her mother Demeter mourns and no longer gives fertility to the earth. This became an ancient Greek explanation for the seasons.

It should be noted that the number of seeds that Persephone ate is varied, depending on which version of the story is told. The number of seeds she is said to have eaten ranges from three to seven, which accounts for just one barren season if it is just three or four seeds, or two barren seasons (half the year) if she ate six or seven seeds. There is no set number.

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The Pomegranate 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 bed-time. When she came running I was ready to make any bargain to keep her. I carried her back past whitebeams and wasps and honey-scented buddleias. But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me. It is winter and the stars are hidden. I climb the stairs and stand where I can see my child asleep beside her teen magazines, her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit. The pomegranate! How did I forget it? She could have come home and been safe and ended the story and all our heart-broken searching but she reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate. She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance. The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured. The suburb has cars and cable television. The veiled stars are above ground. It is another world. But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up. She will hold the papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips. I will say nothing.

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Anorexic Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. Yes I am torching her curves and paps and wiles. They scorch in my self denials. How she meshed my head in the half-truths of her fevers till I renounced milk and honey and the taste of lunch. I vomited her hungers. Now the bitch is burning. I am starved and curveless. I am skin and bone. She has learned her lesson. Thin as a rib I turn in sleep. My dreams probe a claustrophobia a sensuous enclosure. How warm it was and wide once by a warm drum, once by the song of his breath and in his sleeping side. Only a little more, only a few more days sinless, foodless,

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I will slip back into him again as if I had never been away. Caged so I will grow angular and holy past pain, keeping his heart such company as will make me forget in a small space the fall into forked dark, into python needs heaving to hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed.

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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.

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A QUESTION

EAVAN BOLAND

The poem here--"That the Science of Cartography is Limited"--was begun one February afternoon in Dublin. I was working in a room upstairs which overlooked the back garden, although at that moment there was almost nothing to see. I had the light on, my table was against the window. I had a long-sided notebook, dark blue, bought at the news agents in Dundrum village, and a simple ballpoint. Clean pages. The feel of plastic. The un-losable bulk and solidity of the notebook. It was the start of the nineties. There was talk of violence and resolution in Ireland, as there had been for decades. I can remember the uncurtained windows and the dark outside, the sound of my daughters in another room, maybe a television on downstairs. But these are surfaces. Once the poem was finished I could follow it back to another narrative, to a crisscrossing of memory and decision and private history.

Explaining a poem is difficult. The method is inherently unreliable. There is too much instinct and error in the process to make its initiator a good witness afterwards. Akhmatova says of one stage in her poetry "my handwriting had changed and my voice sounded different." But such clear beginnings are rare. The truth is that every poem has a different hinterland: a terrain of chance and shadow, of images in life which stay put until they become images in language. This piece is about a hinterland like that, or at least about the guesswork involved in returning to it. If I engage in that guesswork, it will take me back further than the rainy afternoon and the notebook and the writing of this poem.

There were no maps in our house when I was growing up, none that I remember. At least not in the obvious places where I saw them in other houses--on the walls, framed, or as pages open on a table. If there were I have no image of them. But there were maps at school. I went to a convent just north of London, beginning there a few weeks late when I was six years of age. I had just come from Dublin and the winter weather was starting to close in. Big, strange fogs swallowed the distances from early morning till dusk. The classroom had an ugly electric light which had to be on all day. On the wall in front of my desk was a map. The light turned it into a parchment-yellow with strange, rosy stains. It was a map of the world. Or more properly, a map of empire. The cracked linen unrolled from a wooden bar. The greenish seas edged up to big coral territories. Every day I sat there--six years old, then eight, then ten--always coming back to the same classroom for history, for science, for English, for religion. Always seeing a teacher in front of the map, speaking with certainty and precision. Often entering the strange illusion and that the teacher was mute and the map was speaking through her. Look what I own it said. See what you have lost.

This poem begins--or at least I intended it to--where maps fail. The deliberate awkwardness of the proposition--that the science of cartography is limited--is built into the title and the title is the first line. Why do that? Because I wanted to start this poem, charged as it was for me, with a deliberate mouthful of reason and argument. I wanted to send it towards the reader the way an educator might send an account of empire to a class: announcing acceptable ideas with an illusory logic. Of course this is hindsight. There is never anything so conscious, certainly not in my mind, in the actual writing of a poem. Nevertheless, this was a known and volatile area for me: this precept of map-making, territory-owning.

But if the ideas in a poem are difficult to get at, easy to simplify, the form is a more difficult proposition still. I could say that I am skeptical about poets writing about form, if I hadn't so often

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enjoyed a poet's account of why a word, or a line is this way and not that. In this poem, the form is relatively open. My background was in the lyric, and in the closed lyric at that. The Dublin of the early sixties where I first thought about poetry, first argued about it, first published it, was a powerful and closed world. The poem in the air, in the ethos, was a make-well lyric: stanzaic, rhyming, symmetrical in argument. This was the poem I had laboured to write in my late teens and at the start of my twenties--someone else's poem, not mine.

If, on that dark February afternoon, it was my own poem, it was because a complicated, and hard to explain series of realizations had brought me there. I was, by now, in my forties. I had long ago grown restive with the closed models of Irish lyric poems--and British as well. My feeling was that they privileged the music and marginalized the voice. Since I had every instinct to go along with that when I was young, I had painfully and determinedly come to a more fractured and open-ended line and stanza, where the acoustics for the voice were better: 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.

Those lines had an exact source for me. When I was first married, my husband Kevin--whose people had come from Mayo and who had had been brought up in Meath--pointed out the heartbreaking path of a famine road in a wood. The famine roads belonged to the second year of the Irish famine. In 1847, the Relief Committees, coming to Ireland from the economic councils of Lord Trevelyan and the British government, decided the Irish should work for their food. In the simple and most understated testament of heartlessness, they required strength of those who had none. Where those roads end in those woods is where those building them died.

Did that terrible line, that mark of death in the woods, immediately join that other image--of the fogbound classroom, the map stained with power, the alien city and my first lessons in exile? Probably not. An image, in a poem, is a strange archive. The key is only partly held by the poet. The reader holds another part. The objective truth is hard to find and finally, probably unnecessary. But gradually, these fragments joined into something in my mind. I was certainly aware, long before I wrote this poem, that the act of mapmaking is an act of power and that I--as a poet, as a woman and as a witness to the strange Irish silences which met that mixture of identities--was more and more inclined to contest those acts of power. The official version-and a map is rarely anything else--might not be suspect as it discovered territories and marked out destinations. But the fact that these roads, so powerful in their meaning and so powerless at their origin, never showed up on any map of Ireland seemed to me then, as it does now, both emblematic and ironic.

The poem had some other meanings for me as well. Those years-the eighties and nineties--were a time of debate in Irish poetry about the nature of the political poem. What was a political poem? Who was entitled to write it? But it was also a time when the resistances to women, to the unsettling of the Irish canon were very visible. There seemed to be a belief in more conservative literary debate that women might write the domestic poem, the poem about the suburbs, but not the mainstream Irish political poem. This poem is a small inventory of my views. The political poem was at its best, I believed-and Irish poetry had come to this late--when it was private at source. This is a poem with a deliberate domestic world, just hinted at, just quickly sketched: myself and my husband in a wood, looking down at those roads. It opens out into the considerations and darknesses which no domesticity, no household, no love and no security is safe from. The meeting of those worlds is entirely deliberate.

This is not a long poem. Inasmuch as I could, I tried to put together the elements of voice with the sequence of the narrative. I began it one afternoon and within a week or so it was finished. Some definite articles were changed, some lines became shorter and others longer. Then I set it aside. Oddly enough, I never submitted it for publication in that year or the next. But I put it as the first poem in a

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book I published a few years later called "In a Time of Violence." I remain connected to it because it remains for me a small diagram of an argument most poets enter at some stage or another: who makes the destination, who marks the way, where is authority, and who will contest it? If there are no exact answers, at least there are questions. I hoped this poem would be one of them.

Degas's Laundresses You rise, you dawn roll-sleeved Aphrodite, out of a camisol brine, a linen pit of stiches, silking the fitten sheets away from you like waves. You seam dreams in the folds of wash from which freshes the whiff and reach of fields where it bleached and stiffened. Your chat's sabbatical: brides, wedding outfits, a pleasure of leisured women are sweated into the folds, the neat heaps of linen. Now the drag of the clasp. Your wrists basket your waist. You round to the square weight. Wait. There behind you. A man. There behind you. Whatever you do don't turn. Why is he watching you? Whatever you do don't turn.

Whatever you do don't turn

See he takes his ease staking his easel so, slowly sharpening charcoal, closing his eyes just so, slowly smiling as if so slowly he is unbandaging his mind. Surely a good laundress would understand its twists, its white turns,

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its blind designs --

it's your winding sheet.

In "Degas's Laundresses," Eavan Boland brings to life in words an oil painting by artist Edgar Degas.

Although in the title of the poem Boland does not specify which of Degas's several paintings of

laundresses she intends the reader to reference, it can only be "Laundresses Carrying Linen in Town."

The proof lies in the lines, "Your wrists basket your waist. / You round to the square weight" (l. 17-18),

which clearly describe the posture and gesture of the women in the painting. Though the effect of the

poem may be heightened by the reader's familiarity with the painting, Boland makes it possible to fully

enter the scene even without a tangible reference. Boland's use of the second person and innovative

word choice bring an immediacy to the painting unachieved by Degas himself. Where Degas seems to

treat his subjects purely with an aesthetic eye, Boland investigates the circumstances underlying the

single moment captured in the painting.

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Solitary

Night: An oratory of dark, a chapel of unreason. Here in the shrubbery the shrine. I am its votary, its season. Flames single to my fingers expert to pick out their heart, the sacred heat none may violate. You could die for this. The gods could make you blind. I defy them. I know, only I know these incendiary and frenzied ways: I am alone no one’s here, no one sees my hands fan and cup, my thumbs tinder. How it leaps from spark to blaze! I flush. I darken. How my flesh summers, how my mind shadows meshed in this brightness,

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how my cry blasphemes light and dark, screams land from sea, makes word flesh that now makes me animal inanimate, satiate, and back I go to a slack tip, a light. I stint my worship, the cold watch I keep. Fires flint somewhere else. I winter into sleep.

A Woman Without A Country

As dawn breaks he enters A room with the odor of acid. He lays the copper plate on the table. And reaches for the shaft of the burin. Dublin wakes to horses and rain. Street hawkers call. All the news is famine and famine. The flat graver, the round graver, The angle tint tool wait for him. He bends to his work and begins. He starts with the head, cutting in To the line of the cheek, finding The slope of the skull, incising The shape of a face that becomes A foundry of shadows, rendering  — With a deeper cut into copper  —

The whole woman as a skeleton,

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The rags of   her skirt, her wrist

In a bony line forever severing Her body from its native air until She is ready for the page, For the street vendor, for A new inventory which now To loss and to laissez-faire adds The odor of acid and the little, Pitiless tragedy of   being imagined.

He puts his tools away, One by one; lays them out carefully On the deal table, his work done.

Source: Poetry (April 2013). And Soul

My mother died one summer— the wettest in the records of the state. Crops rotted in the west. Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. Empty deck chairs collected rain. As I took my way to her through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly behind houses and on curbsides, to pay her the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something I remembered I heard once, that the body is, or is said to be, almost all water and as I turned southward, that ours is a city of it, one in which every single day the elements begin a journey towards each other that will never,

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given our weather, fail— the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, cloud color reaching into air, the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, as if that wasn't enough, all of it ending up almost every evening inside our speech— coast canal ocean river stream and now mother and I drove on and although the mind is unreliable in grief, at the next cloudburst it almost seemed they could be shades of each other, the way the body is of every one of them and now they were on the move again—fog into mist, mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze that lay on the railings of the house she was dying in as I went inside.

“And Soul” from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©2007 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Source: Domestic Violence (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2007)

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The Lost Land I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own. And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape:

Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons:

At night, on the edge of sleep,

I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling on everything they had to leave? And would love forever? And then

I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

“The Lost Land” from THE LOST LAND by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©1998 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Source: The Lost Land (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)

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