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Life and background
Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 to diplomat Frederick Boland and artist Frances Kelly. As a young child she moved, with her parents, firstly to London and later to New York. She has described the experience of leaving Ireland in terms of a painful exile.
On her return to Ireland as a teenager, she completed her secondary education in Dublin and went on to study English and Latin at Trinity College. She lectured for a time in Trinity but feeling unsuited to an academic career, she devoted herself in 1967 to writing poetry full-time. She met and had lengthy, inspiring conversations with poets such as Patrick Kavanagh, Michael Longley and Brendan Kennelly, but she began to realise that the male voice dominated Irish poetry and that her own, and other female experiences, were not reflected there.
She married novelist Kevin Casey in 1969 and moved to the Dublin suburb of Dundrum, where she reared her two daughters and continued to write. In 1979, she and her family lived in the USA, where she attended the International Writing Program at Iowa University and where she was greatly influenced by the North American Women's movement. She has worked as a literary journalist with both R.T.E. and The Irish Times and is co-founder of the feminist publishing company, Arlen House.
Commentary
Eavan Boland abandoned an academic career because she felt restricted and threatened by its structured version of literature. She wanted to write about what was important to her in a way that was not bound by traditional ideas about how poetry should be written.
Her poetry reflects her desire to explore previously uncharted regions of the female experience and to give voice to realities that she felt had been shrouded in either silence or myth. According to herself, she wrote her way into her own reality. Her reality as an Irish female poet living in the suburbs of Dublin, dealing with the ebb and flow of her relationships with her husband and daughters, and finding her own identity in the midst of these, is reflected throughout her work.
She explores issues of Irish significance, such as the Famine in The Famine Road and The Troubles in War Horse and Child of Our Time. Her focus is not, however, on "a cause" in these poems but on the human tragedy and suffering at the heart of the conflict. Famine Road draws a comparison between the suffering of famine victims and that of an infertile woman, and as such it brings an interesting female perspective to bear on the subject. Both War Horse and Child of Our Time examine the impact of violence on our lives, and assert our responsibility towards one another in society. War Horse suggests that when, "through subterfuge" or fear, we tolerate violence in order to feel safe ourselves, we live in a "world betrayed". The small child, a victim of violence, in Child of Our Time, is a symbol of that betrayal impelling us to find a "new language" with which to resolve our problems with one another.
Perhaps a part of this "new language" to which Boland refers is the language of women and others whose voices have been excluded from or mythologised in literature and history. She announces unequivocally in Outside History her intention to claim her place in that history and to reclaim that of those who are dead. In The Shadow Doll, she exposes the sense of entrapment and silence, which mark many women's initiation into the world of marriage and childbirth.
The image of the doll in her "airless glamour" represents all the forbidden, unspoken things in the female experience, all the things that were kept "under wraps", all the things that fill Boland's poetry.
In defiance of the silence represented by the shadow doll, Boland's poetry verbalises, celebrates and brings into the light all those female experiences which were once either too illicit or too banal to be considered appropriate material to be written about. In some of her poems she deals with such taboo subjects as physical and emotional abuse, anorexia and menstruation.
She explores her parent's youthful sexuality and sensuality in The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me. The relationship between mother and daughter is considered through the use of myth in The Pomegranate. The touching poem, Love, deals with the sadness at the loss of a certain connection with her husband and the inability of language to recapture that feeling adequately.
Through her poems, she explores what it means to be woman, Irishwoman, poet, mother, daughter and lover, and allows the voices of the past to enter her work and be heard.
It is not merely the language of women that Boland tries to incorporate into her work, but any language or way of being that has not been considered worthy of being officially recorded. In White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland, she suggests that the folklore of the West is another language that is powerful and rich; and yet it, too, has been relegated to that place which is "outside history".
Boland has said that in her poetry she seeks to "bless the ordinary, sanctify the common" and nowhere is this more obvious than in the short lyric, This Moment. The economic style and simple imagery eloquently capture the exquisite beauty of a moment in a suburban garden at twilight. What is being celebrated here is the fleeting moment in which mystery is glimpsed in and beyond the banal. It is this element of searching out the mystery and beauty in the familiar and common aspects of a life, that makes Boland's poetry relevant not just for women, but for anyone concerned with what she herself calls "lives living in a state of process".
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