Eavan Boland’s New Collected Poems is, as the Author’s Note points out, remarkably comprehensive: “reversing” omissions from the earlier (1995) Collected as well as adding more recent material. And this is of real importance. Any Collected has, after all, something less to do with the simple textual pleasures of a Selected – the way the poems fit the new form in which they’re now gathered; their achievement as those which have passed some additional selection test –and more with offering a serious, a comprehensive, record of poetic development. Every poet produces pieces she outgrows. And not only juvenilia: such as Boland’s first poems included here, taken from a chapbook published when she was eighteen. A writing career embraces transition, experiment, repetition. More famous pieces can seem dulled when placed in the context of a developing thought. For the casual reader looking for a quick poetic “hit”, then, the 320 substantial pages of Boland’s Collected may be a dense, even a challenging, place to start. For anyone wanting to enlarge their understanding of contemporary British and Irish poetry, though, this is an absolutely necessary book.

Eavan Boland’s work is characterised by her distinctive poetics. Its diction is tight, lucid; her writing demonstrates a consummate ease in the incorporation of imagery; it marries the private and the public, the numinous apprehension and the political given, with quiet virtuosity. But it’s impossible to have even a passing acquaintance with this poetry without acknowledging that, to an unusual extent, Boland’s work is informed – even determined – by her poetic project. What she writes is above all shaped by what she writes it for.

Most poets prefer to keep this question of what they write for fuzzy. They may fear the over-determining effects of polemic; or the weaknesses of a structure and resolution which don’t arise out of poetic necessity but from some extra-poetic agenda. In the well-known essays of Object Lessons, Boland – who first lectured at Trinity College Dublin and is now a Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford – situates her own writing in the context of being doubly “disallowed”, as both an Irish citizen and as a woman, an authoritative standpoint. Since it’s impossible to ignore the vigorous heritage of Irish literature, she does this by contrasting the quasi-bardic tradition of the poet as public activist – a Byronic figure with many bars to get to – with the continuing, perhaps even enslaved, everyday life of women in the Irish home. It’s in the labour of poverty, poems like “The Achill Woman” from Outside History argue, that the enduring condition of the country is to be found, rather than in the ivory tower of the poetic canon:

And she was nearly finished for the day.
And I was all talk, raw from college –

Of course, to record what Boland calls “the harmonies of servitude” is itself a literary project; a view from the tower. So the accumulated music of the everyday life of things – the “school where all the children wore darned worsted” (‘Fond Memory’), the “rinds slanting around fruit” (‘This Moment’), “a plate/of bacon and potatoes” (‘Once in Dublin’) – in books published across the last twenty years, is itself an orchestration. We can see this in the characteristic strategies to which Boland returns to construct her quiet, if haunting, prosody. These include: frequent, and rich, use of sequences – a form she develops into a kind of federation of linked poems, each in some way unable in some way to bear its own weight alone, but none a passenger –; the juxtaposition of aspects of the natural world, often weather or the liminal light of dusk, with the concrete and narrative matter of a domestic miniature – as if to naturalise that material; and the short, uncluttered lines which nevertheless resonate, as this book moves on, with an increasingly elegiac note. Reading them, we understand the effort of will involved in sustaining the still surface of these poems, in which the unspoken life must be made to speak up:

How do I know my country? Let me tell you
it has been hard to do. […]

I went behind the linen room and up
the stone stairs and climbed to the top.
And stood for a moment there, concealed
by shadows. In a hiding place.
Waiting to see. […] (‘Unheroic’)

What the reader who has waited for this book can see is what very hard work this has indeed been. The collections from before 1987’s transitional The Journey embark on strikingly different projects from those of Outside History (1990) and after. In other words, the canonical Boland of today writes a poetry which is highly-achieved, rather than automatic. Evidence of a long apprenticeship, these earlier books also wear their influences on their sleeves. 1980’s two collections of “maternity poems” are clearly written after Plath, who casts a shadow over virtually every poem, from the opening of Night Feed – “The woman is as round/as the new ring/ambering her finger” (‘Domestic Interior’) – to In Her Own Image’s brutally short-lined ‘Menses’:

[…] I am the moon’s looking-glass.
My day are moon-dials.
She will never be done with me.
She needs me.
She is dry. […]

And influence of another kind is apparent in 1967’s New Territory, where a distinctive number of poems are dedicated to the most important poets of Eavan Boland’s generation: among then Brendan Kennelly, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley.

Poetry after all is not created in isolation; and Boland’s distinctive legacy to date is to show us – whether as readers or writers of poetry – that, through a conscious act of positioning, the true poet – whether or not she is Irish; whatever her gender – can make their individual context, however apparently unpromising, the matter of poetry itself.

Eaven Boland, New Collected Poems, Carcanet Press,  2005. £14.95. 1-8-57548-58-2
© Fiona Sampson, 2006

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.