Squaring the Accounts
In Eavan Boland’s posthumous book, The Historians, poetry is a ledger of
Ireland’s sins and sanctities.
The Historians, Poems by Eavan Boland
(Republic of Ireland) W.W. Norton & Company The past is a pile of odds and ends: letters and lithographs, paint chips and pot shards. The historian sorts these bits of clobber into a chronological tale. But the poet Eavan Boland handles the dusty stuff like runes. In The Historians, Boland casts the artifacts onto the page, then reads their message: Ireland must be held to account, to balance its beauty with its beastliness. It is fitting that Boland’s final book, published just after her death from stroke in 2020, reads like a final tally of her culture and landscape. Her writing in The Historians is emotional, but ruthlessly so—dry-eyed, matter-of-fact, never wistful or nostalgic. These qualities are on full display in a poem titled “Eviction,” which tells of an eviction notice served on Boland’s grandmother, and the court proceedings and the reportage that followed: |
Leaving behind the autumn evening.
Leaving behind the room she entered. Leaving behind the reason I have always resisted history. A woman leaves a courtroom in tears. A nation is rising to the light. History notes the second not the first. |
What Boland resists in history is the tidy narrative it creates from things like eviction notices and newspaper clippings, things which, in the moment, made individual lives an untidy mess. Boland also sees that such ransacked lives are often those of women. Many poems in the volume express women’s struggles against adversities, large and small. These struggles are absent from recorded history, but are intimately valuable to the felt legacy of Ireland, its glory and its shame.
In “Broken,” for example, the poet recounts a dream of dishonest “old patriots, their mouths stuffed with bronze” presiding over the grisly find of a woman’s severed head in Dublin’s River Liffey. “Ireland,” asks Boland in this poem, “how could I have ever loved you if I never believed you?” In contrast, the poem “Anonymous” describes a woman of agency, related to Boland, who carried messages and documents for Irish republicans early in the 20th century. Here, Boland asserts that paper records—historical documents—are devoid of the woman’s life. Poetry can capture the real woman with her papers, although weakly, since the poet knows little more than an imagined scene. Boland envisions the woman walking at night, holding a folded message, then asks and answers her own question:
In “Broken,” for example, the poet recounts a dream of dishonest “old patriots, their mouths stuffed with bronze” presiding over the grisly find of a woman’s severed head in Dublin’s River Liffey. “Ireland,” asks Boland in this poem, “how could I have ever loved you if I never believed you?” In contrast, the poem “Anonymous” describes a woman of agency, related to Boland, who carried messages and documents for Irish republicans early in the 20th century. Here, Boland asserts that paper records—historical documents—are devoid of the woman’s life. Poetry can capture the real woman with her papers, although weakly, since the poet knows little more than an imagined scene. Boland envisions the woman walking at night, holding a folded message, then asks and answers her own question:
Then I ask myself,
what is it I know? The evening mist unfolds. It is empty. That is history. This is only poetry. |
Some of The Historians most affecting poems express the poet’s own history of becoming a writer. Boland sees her evolution in Irish handiwork, in her island’s topography and seascapes, and in the detritus of her mother—the painter Judy Boland (née Frances Josephine Kelly).
In “Three Crafts,” the murmurs of waves and a spinning wheel accompany Boland’s late nights as a young writer, crafting her work to the rise and fall of these sounds. In “The Fire Gilder,” Boland’s mother describes to her daughter a method of gilding by flame that she learned while studying art, a dangerous process Boland equates to the dangers of the writing life. Boland thinks of her mother’s paints and tools in “Translating the Word Home,” then considers how, as a poet, she wished to pen words as true as the strokes of her mother’s sable brush. What gives these poems special resonance is that traditional Irish life ways run beneath them like an underground river, bubbling up in images of coastal towns, of peat smoke in a house snug against the Atlantic winter.
In terms of poetic craft, The Historians, continues what Boland accomplished with increasing skill throughout her long career: deft use of the one-syllable English word. Like Heaney and Yeats (rare company indeed), Boland hits that single Anglo-Saxon beat to drive her poems inexorably forward—from “the tree’s root, to the tree’s height, of earth to sky.”
Boland has exquisite control over this technique. So much so, that she can set the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable against the Latinate polysyllable, to give a sound to the oppression of Ireland by Catholicism. Boland does this in my favorite poem in the book, “The Light We Lost.” Describing a stained glass window of saints, Boland writes:
In “Three Crafts,” the murmurs of waves and a spinning wheel accompany Boland’s late nights as a young writer, crafting her work to the rise and fall of these sounds. In “The Fire Gilder,” Boland’s mother describes to her daughter a method of gilding by flame that she learned while studying art, a dangerous process Boland equates to the dangers of the writing life. Boland thinks of her mother’s paints and tools in “Translating the Word Home,” then considers how, as a poet, she wished to pen words as true as the strokes of her mother’s sable brush. What gives these poems special resonance is that traditional Irish life ways run beneath them like an underground river, bubbling up in images of coastal towns, of peat smoke in a house snug against the Atlantic winter.
In terms of poetic craft, The Historians, continues what Boland accomplished with increasing skill throughout her long career: deft use of the one-syllable English word. Like Heaney and Yeats (rare company indeed), Boland hits that single Anglo-Saxon beat to drive her poems inexorably forward—from “the tree’s root, to the tree’s height, of earth to sky.”
Boland has exquisite control over this technique. So much so, that she can set the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable against the Latinate polysyllable, to give a sound to the oppression of Ireland by Catholicism. Boland does this in my favorite poem in the book, “The Light We Lost.” Describing a stained glass window of saints, Boland writes:
I look up. Painted on glass
inside the algebras of windows’ spaces they look down: savage azures keeping out the light of a small country. |
Boland writes in well-scaffolded free verse. Her stanzas are typically the same number of lines. When she uses indentation, she does so in a pattern, as in her beautiful poem “Rain,” where a pattern of indented and non-indented lines creates a tone at once liquid and rhythmic. Boland’s sturdy structuring may not be au courant, but it gives her poems a great deal of force and allows them to instantiate history by harking back to older forms. She is abetted in this by her willingness to use the pentameter, although with a twist, such as breaking it into five-beat lines.
Boland is also a master of the subtle end-of-line or internal rhyme that adds music but never overpowers. She puts this to brilliant use in the opening lines of “How We Were Transfigured.” This mysterious poem lightly touches the ongoing and enormous paradigm shift in human consciousness from hearth and home to the wide world and its environment:
Boland is also a master of the subtle end-of-line or internal rhyme that adds music but never overpowers. She puts this to brilliant use in the opening lines of “How We Were Transfigured.” This mysterious poem lightly touches the ongoing and enormous paradigm shift in human consciousness from hearth and home to the wide world and its environment:
Now when darkness starts
in midafternoon when evening shows an unwelcome half-sliced winter moon I remember days when I never thought twice about what was farther off from the four walls of our house, from the hills above it, from our infant daughters sleeping… |
The Historians is not a flawless collection. The book’s section divisions are lacking in the strict logic that is my preference. Three sections are named for a poem within each, including a section named “The Historians” for the book’s title poem “The Historians.” This feels like “Historian” overkill once you factor in the name of the book. Moreover, the poems placed into each of these three sections do not always chime with the section title. A final, fourth section takes the name of the sole poem in it, “Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women,” a long ode commissioned on the centenary of Irish women’s suffrage by the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the United Nations and the Royal Irish Academy. It is—predictably for a commissioned poem—a bore, replete with a long list of suffragists’ names and vain words like “foremothers” and “prevailed.”
None of the failings is fatal to the work. The Historians is a fine coda to a woman’s life in art, well-lived. Boland’s poems chalk up the assets and liabilities of the world that made her a poet. She ends up where she wants to be, with Ireland inventoried cleanly on her page, so that she can “stand if only for one moment, on its margin.”
—Dana Delibovi
None of the failings is fatal to the work. The Historians is a fine coda to a woman’s life in art, well-lived. Boland’s poems chalk up the assets and liabilities of the world that made her a poet. She ends up where she wants to be, with Ireland inventoried cleanly on her page, so that she can “stand if only for one moment, on its margin.”
—Dana Delibovi
Eavan Boland (1944–2020) was one of Ireland’s foremost poets, as well as an essayist, editor, and teacher. Born in Dublin, Boland spent part of her childhood in London, where her father served as Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom. As a writer or editor, Boland published more than 30 books, all in English, including collections of poetry, critical essays, and anthologies. Early in her career, she taught at Trinity College, Dublin, then served from 1996 until her death as professor of English Stanford University in the United States, dividing her time between California and Ireland. She received the Lannan Award for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize.