!"#"$%&'("$)%"$)%*+,%-'(.*./0%'1%23*+'4.*5%.$%64.

0+%-',*45
23*+'47089%:"*4.'$"%:(3**,4;3/<
='34/,9%>+,%?,"4;''<%'1%!$@(.0+%=*3).,0A%B'(C%DEA%64.0+%F4.*.$@%0.$/,%GHEI%7JIIE8A%KKC%LJMHI
-3;(.0+,)%;59%Modern Humanities Research Association
=*";(,%NOP9%http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509326 .
2//,00,)9%JQRIDRJIGG%IH9SJ

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mhra. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Yearbook of English Studies.

http://www.jstor.org
 Eavan Boland and the Politics of Authorityin
Irish Poetry
CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK
CollegeDublin
University

The defining preoccupation and principle of Eavan Boland's work is the

symbiosis of material and form, or as she puts it, 'the whole field of how
experience and expression influence each other in art'.' This essay draws on
her poetry and prose to examine this symbiotic relationshipas it was consoli-
dated in the late I98os and early I99os, by focusing it through the needle's
eye of Boland's overall concerns: the artist'snecessary dilemma of represen-
tative authority in recovering the voice of the Other, as she brings that voice
from outside to inside history.
The contravening in criticism and poetry of art's potential to engage with
reality is the source of Eavan Boland's vocational engagement with the con-
texts of art's reception, and her own reception is an important part of Irish
critical culture's evolving engagement with this issue. A major element of
criticism of Boland centres around her deployment of the representativeself
-the idea that she appropriatesother people's experiences while purport-
ing to represent them, leading to her distortion, falsification, or premature
resolution of the intractable problems of the silenced 'other' by giving it
voice, by 'changing the story'.2As I have argued elsewhere, it is Boland's
consciousness of her representativefunction as artist, and not that function
per se, that generates the unpalatable trace in her work against which
critics in the Irish literary tradition react.3 This essay will argue that such

Eavan Boland, 'The Art of Grief, introduction to Aileen MacKeogh, House(Dublin: Project Press,
1991),pp. 10-I7 (p. ii). Describing a key development in her life as artist, Boland says: 'You're not sure
what's the proper self and what's simply untransmuted egotism. Somehow, the engagement with form
helped me to know one from the other' (Jody Allen-Randolph, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', Irish
UniversityReview,23.I (1993), 117-30 (p. 120)).
2 Eavan
Boland, 'Formal Feeling', TheLostLand(Manchester:Carcanet, 1998), p. 57.
3 Catriona Clutterbuck, 'Irish Critical
Responses to Self-Representation in Eavan Boland, I987-I995',
ColbyQuarterly, 35.4 (December I999), 275-87 (p. 282). The appearance (if not the substance) of writerly
modesty of ambition implied as a criteria in such criticism -an innocence of intent to impress the
consciousness of self as author upon the world -was not an option available to Boland because
of the particular conditions of her emergence and of her entry into maturity as a writer, whereby she
experienced herself as 'other'. In 1969, she described those conditions in a comment upon the career of
the short story writer Frank O'Connor. Her remarkson him are eerily prescient of the strugglesin which
she herself was to become involved in the I98os and I990s, as the poetry from In Her OwnImageonwards
released depth explosions into a conservative Irish national literary tradition: 'Coming to consciousness
in an incoherent society, Michael O'Donovan [whose pseudonym was 'FrankO'Connor'] found himself
to be a changeling. [His] imagination demanded a legible world in which to learn about its own
meaning. Being Irish and condemned to a time and a place where any such meaning was deeply buried,
he had to make do with his own interpretations;and so, from attempting to define himself he came to
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 73
self-consciousnessis crucial to Boland's resistance in her poetry to the very
kinds of appropriation of which she is accused.
Boland takes to task criticism which reduces the 'I' of the text to a combi-
nation of biographical detail and 'psycho-revelation',4 signposting the
practice whereby the 'I' in her own poems rarely designates the primary-
experiencing individual, the 'other' themselves, even when that other is
herself.5Instead, the 'I' in her texts functions as a means of access -a self-
-
consciously limited vehicle of entry to the experience of that other. The 'I'
in Boland's poems becomes authorized, not by the act of imagining or
attempting to understand the other's experience -a prerequisiteof limited
effect - but by entering its claim to that understandinginto aesthetic form,
where it encounters the continuing otherness of its subjects. Only through
the realization of this limitation of the understandingself does the 'I' of the
text become capable of (re)speaking the experience of the other. In the
achieved poem, Boland's work implies, form unites the functions of court of
justice which drives for the conclusiveness of full representivity,and theatri-
cal space which resists any such conclusiveness in order to dramatically
represent and to reconcile, without reducing, the competing claims of the
poet's necessarily limited vision of the experience being treated, and of that
irreducible experience itself. The relationship between these two claims in
the achieved poem is analogous to that between male and female lovers in a
dynamic, mutually satisfying sexual encounter. Thus when Boland declares
that 'mere self-expression is not art.... But there is no art without self-
expression',6she checks even as she also urges the drive to comprehension of
the other's experience by the poet's vision of it.7 In so challenging critical
discourse to take on the 'careful unravelling of the poetic from the private',8
but not to invalidate either in the process, we will see that Boland's work
establishes the artefact as a vital space of encounter between the claims
of experience and vision, history and myth, and female and male creative
principles.

define an aspect of history through himself. The exhaustion and disillusion this caused robbed him of
an innocence most people in a settled world can take for granted' (Eavan Boland, 'The Innocence
of Frank O'Connor', in Michael/Frank:Studieson FrankO'Connor, ed. by Maurice Sheehy (Dublin: Gill &
Macmillan, 1969), pp. 77-85) p. 83). This statement equally describes the 'absence of innocence' being
effected in Boland herself as a result of being female as well as Irish in a time and place where the
meaning of such a conjunction was also 'deeply buried'.
4 Eavan Boland, 'Broken Trust', PN Review,I9.I (September/October 1992), 25-28 (p. 25).
The context for Boland's alertness to herself as 'other' is her experience of herself as marginal to
definitions of agency in normative Irishness, through three linked components of her life narrative:child-
hood exile, a family background attuned on the father's side to service to the nation and on the mother's
to artistic vocation, and, most formatively, female identity in a national tradition of the feminine which
is trapped in the destructive binary of idealized purity and irredeemable contamination.
6 Kevin
Myers, 'Writing in the Margins: A Profile of Eavan Boland', Irish Times, 18 April 1992,
'Weekend', p. I2.
7 Boland's judgement of poets such as Berryman, Roethke, and Lowell results from her sense of their
failure to achieve this crucial balance: 'These were poets who set out to make a poetry of the self, which
is admirable, and too often settled for a poetic self, which is not' (Eavan Boland, 'Private Voices, Public
Virtues', review of David Kalsone, Becoming a Poet,Irish Times,2 June I990, 'Weekend', p. 9).
8 'Broken
Trust', p. 27.
74 EavanBolandandAuthority

For Boland, restrictionin the poet's experience of their subject enters into
relationshipwith the character of constraint or subalternityin that material
itself, to produce rather than exclude the poet's potential for vision of that
experience. This is because, within the formal theatre of understandingthat
is the poem, this dual restriction of experience finds a correlative in the
- the unifying principles of design in
necessary disciplines of aesthetic form
a particularpoem: the building of line and stanza, the use of tone and voice,
the employment of the poetic devices of image and metaphor, rhythm and
metre, and so on. Limitation in material becomes the source of its own
visionary capacity as Boland associates 'metrical units' in poetic form with
the conversion of the sense of insignificancein the everyday quotidian repeti-
tions of daily life to a sense of their revelatorypotential: 'What were all these
[everyday lived repetitions] if not -as language and music in poetry were
-a sequence [...] which allowed the deeper meanings to emerge: a sense of
belonging, of sustenance, of a life revealed, and not restrained,by ritual and
patterning?'9Boland implies here - much as do the repetitions in John
McGahern's ritual-basedfiction - that the larger meanings excluded by the
process of patterning in daily life and in the process of creative writing alike,
return in altered form through that very patterning.
The idea that restricted, limited experience of the world of the other is
an achievement might usefully focus current controversies in an Irish
post-colonial national literary tradition in equivocal wedlock to ideals of
comprehensive representation of marginalized or subaltern experience.'?
The specifically negative status in poetry criticism of restricted experience
has been a significantfocus of challenge by Eavan Boland. Her work argues
that critics err in extrapolatingboth a formal lack of value in the poem and
an inherent lack of value in the material upon which it is based, from their
accurate perception of the in-built limits in material as described above.
Critics of women poets especially, she says, use words like 'domestic' and
'painterly' to 'imply restrictivepractice within the poem itself'." This criti-
cism assumes that what it rightly deems 'restricted' experience implies a
resultingpoetic that is equivalentlyrestricted,which in turn suggests that the
original material was of limited worth. Certain subjects -those which are
unfamiliar and whose significance remains unauthorized within the poetry
tradition- are the targets of this tautologicalpractice of exclusion. Boland's

9 Eavan Boland, ObjectLessons:The Life of the Womanand thePoetin Our Time(Manchester: Carcanet,
I995), p. 170.
'0 For ground-breakingdiscussions of this critical debate, see Colin Graham, 'Subalternityand Gender:
Problems of Postcolonial Irishness', in TheorizingIreland,ed. by Claire Connolly, Readers in Cultural
Criticism (1996; repr. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 15o-59 and Moynagh Sullivan,
'Feminism, Postmodernismand the Subjects of Irish and Women's Studies', in New Voicesin IrishCriticism,
ed. by P. J. Matthews (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 243-5I.
" Denis J. Hannon and Nancy Means Wright, 'Irish Women Poets - Breaking the Silence', Canadian
Journalof IrishStudies,I6.2 (December 1990), 57-65 (p. 60).
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 75
work strongly implies that what is at stake is not merely a matter of limited
judgement in such a critic, it is a matter of wrongjudgement of what actually
makes poems work -a wrong judgement which results from resistance to
the appearance of certain materials in poetry and which is based on a funda-
mental misunderstandingof the origin and role of restriction of all material
in art.
Boland's work, in focusing the connection between criticism'sbias against
certain material and its misunderstanding of the function of restriction of
material in poetry, is particularly important in a current critical climate
which, in the wake of the publication of Volumes IV and V of the TheField
Day Anthology tends to assume too easily that the validity and
of IrishWriting,'2
visibility of Irish women's experience as represented in art is not in question
and will not be in the future.'3 However, the present unacceptability of
blatant prejudice against 'female' material (such as William Logan's 1992
comment on Boland that 'poems of quiet desperation in the kitchen do not
form an original aesthetic')l4is no guarantee against its re-introductionsince,
as Boland's work recognizes, such prejudice is only the outward form of a
more serious oversight of the process of authorial humility towards their
material by which that material becomes invested with authority.
Describing the key I970s 'domestic-reality'stage in her maturation as a
poet, Boland remembers: 'On rainy mornings I looked around my kitchen
and saw materials for a still life. Washing machines and medicine bottles, a
glimpse of poplars in the distance and a child's hand reaching up for mine.
What would it take I wondered to confer on these, not simply a visionary
reality, but a visionary permission as well. [...] To be able to create it,
endow it, argue for it seemed to me where the true authority of the poet
lay.'5 This visionary permission is what she describes as the 'revelatory'
and revolutionary - contribution of nature poets: their 'singl[ing] out
[of] the devalued and [their] mak[ing of] a deep metaphorical relation
between it and some devalued parts of perception. [...] What happens is
that the poet becomes an agent [...] for a different way of seeing. [...] After
a while, I came to think of myself as an indoor nature poet'.'6 Boland is an
indoors poet (or more properly, as she representsherself in 'Anna Liffey', a

12 TheFieldDay Anthology
of IrishWriting,Volumes IV and V: IrishWomen'sWritingand Traditions,ed. by
Angela Bourke, Siobhan Kilfeather and others (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field
Day, 2002).
13
Margaret Kelleher's review article on FieldDay Volumes IV and V contains a timely warning against
such assumptions: 'With the exception of some individual critics, Irish studies as a discipline remains
singularlyill-informed of (and by) the debates and concerns that have occupied Irish feminist criticism in
the past decade. [...] A historical perspective shows how swiftly women's writings may disappear from
view' ('The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary Studies', IrishReview,30 (2003), 82-94).
'1 William Logan, 'Animal Instincts and Natural Powers', review of Eavan Boland, Outside History,New
YorkTimesBookReview,21 April 1992, p. 22.
15 Eavan Boland, 'Gods Make Their Own Importance: The Authority of the Poet in Our Time' (The
Ronald Duncan Lecture I994), PN Review, 2I.4 (March/April i995), I0-I4 (p. Ix).
16
Allen-Randolph, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', pp. 123-24.
76 EavanBolandandAuthority

threshold poet located between inside and outside), in more ways than one.17
What it would take to earn this visionary permission to which she refers
above, is the poet's continued confrontation with restriction of vision of
material within the poem, as well as outside it on the fraught stage of Irish
literary politics. Without the former - and crucially, without its subsequent
recognition in poetry criticism -the latter must fail, and the conferring of
visionary reality and permission for new material in poetry become danger-
ously vulnerable to new erosion. This is why Boland's work offers a continu-
ing corrective to assumptions that patriarchal prejudice against women's
poetry is safely outlawed to the pre-nineties dark ages of Ireland's literary
culture:her work reminds us that such prejudice is based on errorsof critical
judgement that continue to affect understandingof all Irish poets, male and
female, and therefore, that such prejudice is not safeguarded against by
tolerance of women's themes in verse.
The poem 'What we Lost', from the I990 sequence 'Outside History',
concentrates some of the key concerns of this essay in its focus on how
Boland as artist responds to the loss of the evidence of her foremothers'his-
tories in story, icon, or artefact. The poem describes a possible offering of
such evidence -the moment of the telling of an anecdote on a winter's
evening long ago to a child (Boland'smother) by an older woman about that
child's own lost mother who had died years before in giving birth. But the
child soon forgets the story-fragmentand thereby denies a key part of their
own history to the dead woman's heirs who are Boland, her daughters, and,
by implication, all Irish women. Crucially, the poem, like the child, does not
retell the story itself. Instead, it recounts the story's occasion and its loss: the
countrywoman in the evening kitchen who lays down her sewing to talk to a
child who then moves away and falls asleep:
The fieldsare darkalready.
The frailconnectionshave been made and are broken.
The dumb-showof legendhas becomelanguage,
is becomingsilenceand who will knowthat once
wordswere possibilitiesand disappointments
(C.P., p. I59)
'What we Lost' confronts the writer's primary conundrum - that words at
once represent the thing itself and not the thing itself, both possibility and
disappointment. The solution to this conundrum is found by understanding
the nature of elegy, in which what we grieve returns in altered form through
the very process of our intense desire for it. The speaker says of the poem's
winter afternoon's storytelling: 'The moment happens, hangs fire, leads
nowhere.' But the imagining of that scene in this poem, now, is what

17 Eavan Boland, 'Anna Liffey', Collected Poems(Manchester:Carcanet, 1995),p. I99. Further references
to this edition are given parentheticallyas C.P. after quotations in the text. Dates next to these references
refer to the publication dates of the individual volumes in which the poems were first collected.
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 77
contradicts its apparent lack of consequence: significance arises because of
the formation of a container for the event, not because that container sur-
vives unaltered.'8Boland's point in 'What we Lost' is that the real power of
representationis in its tracking of its own dissolution, its own powerlessness.
So the progress of the oral story in this poem, from legend to language to
silence, is a true model for the progress of this and any other poem. This
whole poem is a 'frail connection' remaining paradoxically attached to its
subject by the wax flax-thread of its own loss. In Boland's mature aesthetic,
the act of retrievalis in constant tension with its opposite, the act of losing, as
the poem is formed upon its own self-extinction.
This key moment of formation in art for Boland is the 'moment of sheer
powerlessness'which she elects as central to the experience of the artist. She
configures this moment in her repeated invocation of Virgil's depiction, in
Book VI of the Aeneid,of the dead battle-heroes of the underworld who,
trapped there, cannot make contact with their old battle-companion Aeneas
who visits them: 'The heroes had spoken and their voices had not carried.
Memory was a whisper, a sound that died in your throat."9The challenge to
the authority of the artist is implied in this motif by Boland's inversion of the
usual positioning of the artist, reading him or her as trapped in the Hades of
exclusion from the history they seek to represent.This challenge is confirmed
in the best-known of Boland's many poems dealing with visits to the under-
world,20the dream-visionpoem, 'TheJourney' (I987). This time, it is Boland
as Aeneas-Dante who is the artist figure, entering an underworldof suffering
of the women and children who died in the plague. This is a sufferingthat
she registers but, like the afore-mentioned battle-heroes, which she cannot
directly represent or communicate:
I stood fixed.I could not reachor speakto them.
Betweenus was the melancholyriver,
the dreamwater,the narcoticcrossing
and they had passedover it, its cold persuasions.
(C.P. p. 122)
The 'cold persuasions' of 'the dream water, the narcotic crossing' are the
manipulations of time and art, after whose action the original material
or experience cannot be represented in direct form, but only through
the frustrated desire to connect with it in the individual engaged in its
re-membering: 'What you have seen is beyond speech, | beyond song, only

18
Boland discusses Robert Hass's poem 'Meditation at Lagunitas' as follows: 'The poem is a tapestry
made from [...] elegies and yet is not an elegy. [...] If anything, the poem is an affirmation, taking
language and moving it steadily towards healing and resolution. [...] By the end of the poem, words
have healed and we have healed with them' (Eavan Boland, 'The Serinette Principle: The Lyric in
Contemporary Poetry', PNReview,I9.4 (March/April I993), p. 25. This essay was originally published in
Parnassus:Poetryin Review,15.2 (i989).
19 Boland, ObjectLessons,p. 87. See Boland, 'The Latin Lesson', C.P., p. I44, and 'A False Spring', C.P.
p. 149.
20
See, for example, the Ceres and Persephone poems in Boland's oeuvre:'The Making of an Irish
Goddess', C.P. p. 150 and 'The Pomegranate', C.P. p. I84.
78 EavanBolandandAuthoriy
not beyond love'. 'The Journey', like 'What we Lost', understands that
poetry must fail to represent the experience of loss until it confronts the
incommunicable elements within that experience, and that, commensurately,
this material silence serves the ethically risky freedom of the artist. The
underworldwomen's voices in this poem are the lost utterances that are the
blank spaces which alone guarantee the present voice of the poet, just as
the safety of the speaker'schildren through the availability of the antibiotic
is curiously guaranteed by the deaths of the children of the plague. Boland is
commensurately conscious that her own current life-experience as estab-
lished poet is privileged in comparison with that of the subjects she tries
to recover from 'outside history'. In the 1986 essay, 'The Woman Poet:
Her Dilemma', she describes her own active voice as negatively etched in
relief by the present and future silence of the women she meets at writing
workshops who will never become poets ('Judith').2'The humiliation of her
ambition to comprehend the other (generating her consciousness that her
understanding of the world of the marginalized is limited), works alongside
her life-experience of herself as marginalized from the centres of representa-
tive authority in Ireland to bring her into genuine relationship with that
other.
A central principle in Boland's aesthetic is the value of estrangement, as
implied in these poems' celebrations of the 'sound dying in the throat' of
poetry, the paradox of the acknowledged powerlessnessof art. This paradox
of estrangement is clarified in her 1989 essay, 'The Serinette Principle:The
Lyric in Contemporary Poetry', where she compares the work of poetic
imagery to the casting of fishing flies which both pass and do not pass for the
reality of which they are emblems. For Boland, 'by an eloquent paradox,
these lures reintroduce us to the truth of what they imitate. [...] The lie [of
the image ...] becomes the dexterous, difficultwork of making lures, a prac-
tical emblem of what slips through the fingers.' The lyric, then, becomes an
emblem of what it cannot say, 'a document of the line between language and
its negation [...] a narrative of language itself [...] that dramatizes its power
and its risk:the power, on the one hand, to be itself an experience; the risk,
on the other, that it will actually divide us from the experience'.22Boland
is drawn to both documentary and aesthetic truth in the lyric, and in the
theatre of form of individual poems, suggests reconciliation but not resolu-
tion of the conflict between them as she dramatizes the competing claims
of her political-historical sense of the damage done by misrepresentation
in art and her visionary-mythic sense of the necessity to practise that
misrepresentation.23The task is not to 'disown or simplify' either side

21
Boland, ObjectLessons,pp. 246-47.
22
Boland,'The SerinettePrinciple',pp. 21, 22, 24, 25.
23 For an earlier discussion of the value of misrepresentation in Boland's poetry, see Catriona
Clutterbuck, 'Irish Women's Poetry and the Republic of Ireland: Formalism as Form', in WritingIn the
Irish Republic:Literature,Culture,Politicsi949g-999, ed. by Ray Ryan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000),
pp- 17-43 (PP. 29, 31, 33-34)-
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 79

through 'resolv[ing] an inherent tension by making a false design from the

ethical capabilities of one life or the visionary possibilitiesof the other'.24For
Boland, these two cornerstonesof her aesthetic -ethics and vision- are in
symbiosis.
Their connection is explored in a seminal poem in Boland's oeuvre,
collected in TheJourney(987), 'Mise Eire' (C.P. p. 102), in which, more
directly than in most of her poems, she seems to appropriate another's life-
experience by projecting herself onto that other's life while ignoring crucial
differences of history and privilege between them. In the lines 'I am the
woman - a sloven's mix I of silk at the wrists' and 'I am the woman [...]
Ion board the "Mary Belle" I in the huddling cold', she declares herself
to 'be' the garrison prostitute and emigrant mother whom she offers in the
poem as counter-archetypes to the purified Kathleen Ni Houlihan figure
invoked by the famous Pearsean title. But the poem undermines its own
re-essentializing of female identity by moving forwards from the non-
compromise of its first line's declaration that the poet-speaker 'won't go
back' to the distorted, mythologized, wounding versions of Ireland as female
that are forced to falsely 'heal' Ireland's wrongs, towards the compromise
implicit in the poem's conclusion:
a new language
is a kind of scar
and heals after a while
into a passable imitation
of what went before.
This compromise deliberatelyand directly associatesthe healed scar-tissueof
distortion in representationwith the unblemished flesh of the original mate-
rial, in order to jam open the question:which of these false or true, wounded
or healed, negatively or positively-definedidentities is the 'passableimitation'
of the other? The flawed poem operates as true witness to resistant experi-
ence because of its re-authorizationof language: language here is a medium
to be celebrated for what it does through knowing what it cannot do: heal
experience, act as its substitute, or prove the worth of its user.
The dual process indicated in these poems, of stand-off and convergence
between formal representationand the material upon which it is based, is the
key to the development of Boland's aesthetic. Of the writing of this pivotal
1987 volume, TheJourney,Boland has said: 'I began to work on the ways
in which the music and meaning of each line could either flow together
or clash, both interesting possibilities'.25The fruitful gap, space, or blank
between these two possibilitiesis suggested in Boland's poem (also from The
Journey)on her early exile from Ireland, 'An Irish Childhood in England,

24
Boland, ObjectLessons,p. xiv.
Patty O'Connell, 'Eavan Boland -
25
An Interview', Poetsand WritersMagazine,22.6 (I994), 32-45
(p. 38).
8o EavanBolandandAuthority

I95I' (C.P. p.26). It is explored in this text through her focus on an equiva-
lently fruitful connective gap between the two terms 'I am' and 'I am not',
which is both signalled and overcome in the Hiberno-Englishformulation, 'I
amn't'. This is the formulation that Boland as a child produced in a London
classroom only to be sharply reprimanded: '[YJou're not in Ireland now'.
But the term 'I amn't', along with the poem in which it is set, generates the
possibility of defining identity as subsisting inside this gap between positive
and negative potentials, and is peculiarly apposite for an Irish person in exile
from their own cultural reality -a reality itself defined by dislocation.
Denying the of
possibility finding the self and its world in the space between
positive and negative processes of identification refuses the necessary 'blank'
upon which meaning in art is predicated, the space which must be leapt
between intuition and form in poetry. In the poem Boland describes this as
'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 other words, the space between the inarticulate words that represent
vision of experience ('by heart') and those that follow after that vision
attempting to catch up with it. Boland redefines exile in this poem, therefore,
not as the condition of the gap between 'I am' and 'I am not', but as the
condition of having that gap forbidden to one's consciousness. Such forbid-
ding of the possibility of having identity both ways is a foundational element
of damagingly essentialist critical practices in the response to Boland's
poetry.26
These four poems together dramatize key elements of the first leaf of what
I call the diptych model which underwrites Boland's thinking on how art
comes into being and how it has its effect in the world, the two halves of
which are connected on the powerful hinge of poetic form. In the first leaf of
this diptych, lived experience (whetherthe artist'sown or another's)becomes
the artist'svision of experience -that is, his or her act of imagining it. It is
this 'vision' or activated imagination -a reconstructive borrowing of the
real -which enters the artefact of the poem and not the primary reality
upon which the imagination is focused. Boland is alert to the gap between
objective reality and the equally authentic but different 'real' that is gener-
ated subjectivelyout of that given material through its powerful re-imagining
by the desiring individual. The impact of desire in the artist as living indi-
vidual is central. Describing her visionary consciousness of suburban quotid-
ian life in the period of her daughters'early childhood, she states:'[T]his was
not a world in which my love happened but one whose phenomena occurred
because of it'.27Vision reconstructs material in its own image as a vital
alternative real.

26 See Clutterbuck, 'Irish Critical Responses'.

27
Boland, ObjectLessons,p. I8.
 CATRIONA CLITTERBUCK 81

This principle is vitally illuminated in 'The Black Lace Fan my Mother

Gave Me' (C.P.,p. 137;I990). The fan is a family heirloom containing within
itself the hot Paris evening in which it was bought -that is, the irrecover-
able past of her parents' early sexual relationshipwhich the buying of the fan
either threatened or consolidated or both (throughthe buying of the fan, her
father nearly missed -or else did miss -a key appointment with her
mother). This is a past for which the fan, along with Boland herself as child
of that relationship, now stands. But Boland can only receive this moment
from her own history if she 'improvise[s]'with both the fan and with herself
as its unspoken presence: the past she seeks is recoverable only by its align-
ment with a correlative in the present. So the speaker teaches the poet's role
as she displaces the fan (and with it, the unknowable story of her parents'
relationship)into an entirely new image - the opened 'full, flirtatiousspan'
of a blackbird'swing on this sultry morning in the present summer of the
poem's writing. The opening blackbird'swing suggests Boland's own power-
ful re-imagining of her given material -its sexual potential - in the form
of this poem.
Modulations in tone as the text progresses suggest Boland's progression
into the imaginative and sexual heart of her emblematic material. The first
three stanzas' swift, clear, and darting narrative sentences outline the story,
but they suddenly change in the fourth stanza to rich, descriptive expansive-
ness. As the fourth stanza traces the history of the first three stanzas, we
understand that not only the fan and its secret history are being described,
but also this poem in which the image of the fan and the re-imagining of the
story is set: 'These are wild roses, appliqueed on silk by hand, | darkly
picked, stitched boldly, quickly.'
Boland goes on to describe in terms of the understatementof tortoiseshell,
the base element at once of the fan, of the lost intimate history of sexual
passion it represents, and finally of this poem as the means of that history's
liberty-takingrepresentation:
the rest is tortoiseshelland has the reticent,
clearpatienceof its element.It is
a worn-out,underwaterbullionand it keeps,
even now, an inferenceof its violation.
Both fan and poem as artefacts have allowed the history they represent to
enter and change themselves, through the claim that history makes to its
own continued reticence within the violation of representation: 'The lace
[the intricate decorative aspect of artistic representation]is overcast as if the
weather [of history] | it opened for and offset had entered it.' The artefact
plays an active role in the history it represents by simultaneouslydisplacing
that history and bringing it into focus as outside the comprehension of the
artefact. The fan and poem, therefore, are agents of completion in time that
themselves are not timeless and complete. The fan, a symbol of her parents'
and her own story opening up, signals how an image in art should unfold
82 EavanBolandandAuthority

itself, push itself out to the point of undoing itself, and should above all
convey the understandingthat the experience it represents,and itself, do not
limit or bound each other in any final way.
Myth in Boland's aesthetic is associated with the formation of vision out of
lived experience in the first half of the diptych, the implications of which I
have been exploring here. The status of myth in Boland is far higher than
one might expect from a cursory reading of her famously extensive critique
of the damage inflicted by mythological icons of the female in the Irish and
western poetry traditions.28I return once again to her musing on the key
period of her life as a young mother for support for this argument: 'On those
summer evenings [...] I could have wondered where myth begins. [...] Is
there something about the repeated action - about lifting a child, clearing a
dish, watching the seasons return to a tree and depart from a vista - which
reveals a deeper meaning to existence and heals some of the worse abrasions
of time?'29By implication, in poetry 'myth' occupies the vital, interim stage
between experience and form incarnated as text. In short, the poet is
required to mythologize experience before he or she can recreate it in text.
Boland by the mid-Ig8os had come to the understanding that the artist's
knowing acceptance of her own falsification of material as her vision of it
drives it towards resolution is a key component in the success of her art.
As she remarks: 'To a degree all art is self-delusion, self-delusion is hard
to separate from the self-confidence and the self-confidence impossible to
separate from the commitment.'30
However, this conclusion is not the about-turn it may seem from a career
defined by invigilation of such self-delusion.The difference between damag-
ing and enabling falsification of material is the absence or presence of the
artist's confrontation within the poem of that same act of authorial distor-
tion. Such a confrontation is subtly dramatized in the hall-of-mirrorspoem,
'Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening' (C.P., p. Io3; 1987), where Boland
creates her own self-portraitas artist by standing critically behind both the
eighteenth-centuryFrench painter Chardin as he paints a female figure, and
her own younger self in the act of equivocal acknowledgementof his mastery
in this same painting, as we found her twenty years earlier in the poem,
'From the painting "Backfrom Market"by Chardin' (C.P.,p. 3; I967). In the
later Chardin poem, Boland draws into the open the hidden recognition
in her earlier piece that 'Truth makes shift.' This 'Self-Portrait'delicately
balances disapproval of the contrivance the artist has forced on the 'truth'
('Can't you feel it? I Aren't you chilled by it?' she rhetorically asks of the
viewer), with approval of truth in art as a form of contrivance, a 'making-do'.
She does this by making the comment on Chardin's optical illusion itself into
28
See, for example, Boland's essays 'Outside History' and 'Making the Difference', ObjectLessons,
pp. 123-54, 202-38.
29
Boland, ObjectLessons,pp. I68-69.
30
Myers, 'Writing in the Margins', p. 12.
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 83
an optical illusion within the poem, as the cover is dropped and the speaker
emerges as the focus of the poem in her dual identity as both Chardin's
woman and Chardin himself:
the lazulis of the horizon [in the painting] becoming
opticalgreys
beforeyour eyes
beforeyour eyes
in my ankle-length
summerskirt
crossingbetween
the gardenand the house.
Boland's overt objections to the 'glazing over' of the woman and the
transitory moment are quietly answered by the fact of the poem in which
these objections are set, by the speaker's acknowledging that the process in
which the quotidian is 'hardened' into art is also her own.
The danger of myth in poetry, however, relates to the neglect of such
criticalyet self-acceptingself-portraiture.The distortionthat resultsfrom this
neglect occursjust after the key early stage of the poetic process, when expe-
rience is translated into vision of experience, and just before it enters the
poetry text. Damage is done where the poet's vision at this moment is privi-
leged to the extent that in the resulting poem it dominates and silences the
voices both of the original experience and of the vulnerably desiring poet
who first approached that material. This is 'the instant when absence of
voice gives way to expression' which Boland nominates as the most danger-
ous moment for the poet: 'At that split second [...] all the rough surfaces
give way to the polish and slip of language. Then it can seem easily that the
force is in the language, not in the awkward experience it voices. [...] The
temptation is to honour the power of poetry and forget that hinterland
where you lived for so long, without a sound in your throat, without a
syllable at your command.'31 Succumbing to this temptation results in
'poetry as power complex' or 'magic' in which 'experience itself is sifted so
that the "poetic"bits are winnowed out. [...] Death and limitation and time
are not met, as in the best poetry; they are made to disappear'.32
The I994 sequence 'In a Time of Violence' challenges such elisions
by requiring its readers to perceive the violence in as well as behind those
artefacts which measure cultural security and safety. The poems in this
sequence chillingly suggest a relationship of consequentiality between an
artefact made out of the material of suffering upon which no mark of that
suffering is allowed to survive, and the violent destruction of the culture
which commanded that elision. For example, in 'In a Bad Light', the

31
Boland, ObjectLessons,p. 77.
32
Eavan Boland, 'Religion and Poetry', TheFurrow,33.12 (1982), 744-45. See also Eavan Boland, 'When
the Spirit Moves', Jew rorkReviewof Books,42.1 (I2 January 1995), 25-28.
84 EavanBolandandAuthority

poverty-stricken Irish immigrant seamstresses speak back to the culture of

Southern plantation privilege which existed just prior to the American Civil
War, which had silenced them and their co-slaves' suffering as the point of
origin of the beautiful artistry by which that culture knew itself:
We dream a woman on a steamboat parading in sunshine in a
dress we know we made. She laughs off rumours of war. She
turns and traps light on the skirt. It is, for that moment, beautiful.
(C.P., p. 177)
It is not the coming war which is sinister in this poem, but the already-
present corruption in the facade of beauty in a culture that is both produced
and destroyed through that facade. This poem, like many in Boland's
mature aesthetic, suggests that any artefact contains a destructive indepen-
dent force which is activated when the destructive element of its making is
suppressed. In the figure of the belle who wears the dress, Boland is warning
not only the culture that makes the artefact, but that which receives it, that
attention to its subtext is vital. The artefact, in other words, is dangerous to
any audience that will not interrogate it thoroughly. It is not benign or
neutral -the artefact is, in the words of the speaker in another poem in
the sequence, 'Beautiful Speech', 'waiting [...] I [...] To strike' (C.P., p. I8i).
Boland's aesthetic associates the silencing of material and of the desiring self
of the makers of artefacts explored in 'In a Bad Light', with the eroticization
of material in art. She says of this material:
[T]he erotic object is possessed not by the power of sexuality but by the power of
expression. The erotic object therefore becomes a beautiful mime of those forces
of expression which have silenced it. [...] The impression [such a] poem leaves is of
power and possession, rendered as delight by the decorum of language. It is an
impression made [...] vivid by [...] the ascribing of vision and perception to the
speaker and only movement to the spoken-of.33
Boland's understanding of the distortion created by the over-privileging of
the poet's vision of experience leading to the eroticization of that experience
forms the basis of her interrogation of Irish culture in which 'the idea of an
Ireland resolved, healed of its wounds' was 'an irreducible presence'.34 Her
interrogation of the misuse of the female figure to guarantee this positivist
idea of Ireland is well known, but less recognized is her focus on parallel
figures and groups made to serve the same reductive function in Irish
culture. One of these groups is the French Protestant Huguenots, who in the
late seventeenth century established a number of settlements in Ireland as
refugees fleeing religious persecution in their home country. Boland's I994
poem, 'The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City' (C.P., p. I93) is
a subtle response to the revving-up of the Celtic Tiger and its assumption of

33 Boland,
ObjectLessons,pp. 212, 213, 214. The last two sentences in this quotation derive from Boland's
critique of Robert Herrick's 'Upon Julia's Clothes', which she cites as exemplary of the distortion under
discussion.
34 Boland, 'The Woman Poet in a National Tradition', Studies,76.302 (I987), I48-58 (p. i49).
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 85
the nation as a meta-narrative that believed itself hospitable to all
micronarrativeswithin it (to swerve Seamus Deane's famous phrase).35The
poem offers a remarkablyprescient anticipation of the crisis of identity with
regard to the inclusion of the marginalizedwhich Irish people in the Repub-
lic were to experience in the mid-to-late nineties. This crisis was focused
through the immigration and refugee situation, the stalling of the peace
process in Northern Ireland, the disgrace of the revelations of decades-old
institutionalized power abuse at the highest levels of government, and the
apparent futility of expectation that, despite input of resources, the forces of
law and order and of health-care would respond adequately to the new and
old challenges to naturaljustice being offered them.
Boland uses the long-closed Huguenot graveyard in Dublin as a physical
marker of an overlooked ethical space that needs to be re-opened in our
national consciousness. In the poem, Boland questions our complacent
admiration of our welcome to a beleaguered and persecuted people: 'There
is a flatteryin being a destination. I There is a vanity in being the last resort.'
As the source of Irish vanity, the Huguenots and other refugee peoples are
eroticized material who occupy an 'alcove of twilight' in the national con-
sciousness. Boland's term here suggests their in-between role between the
night of dark sectarian ignorance and the day of pluralisticcivilized enlight-
enment. The poem is concerned with shedding light into this alcove in order
to re-introduce a necessary modesty of Irish claims to these peoples. This
can happen, the poem indicates, by realizing their essential indifference to
Ireland and Irishness at the point of their journey into exile here:
for theirsakes,acceptin that moment,
this city with its coloursof sky and day
and which is dear to us and particular
was not a place to them: merely
the one witty step ahead of hate which
is all that they could keep. Or stay.
Not just 'for their sakes', but for ours also, the poem implies, we need to
accept that this foreign community remain integral to our Irish identity
in our strangeness to them more than in their strangeness to us. In this
way, their closed graveyard can function as a link in the hinge that will
open an isolationist-independentIrish national identity into an inclusively
interdependent one.
Arguing that 'there are technical conservatisms and imaginative con-
straintsin Irish poetry which feed each other',36Boland suggeststhat poetry's
aim to resolve actual experience through the act of poetry - or in the terms

35 Seamus Deane, General Introduction, in TheFieldDay Anthology

of IrishWritinged. by Seamus Deane
(Derry: Field Day Publications, I99I), Vol. I, p. xix.
36
Allen-Randolph, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', p. 122.
86 EavanBolandandAuthority

established earlier, to eroticize it -is narrowly reductive of the complexity

of that experience. This means that many Irish poems 'accrued too much
power to the speaker to allow that speaker to be himself a plausible critic of
power',37and she warns: '[A]n authoritarian community of [such] writers
can be a very dangerous editor of the forces in a community.'38This danger-
ous editing of community forces surfaces in the treatment of gender in such
a poem: '[T]he Irish poem was not the least bit subversiveabout gender. In
other words it demoted and suspected women's experience, exactly as the
society it occurred in demoted and suspected that experience. I knew enough
even as quite a young poet -to know that there should not be such a
correlationbetween the conservativeelements of an art-formand a society.'39
Boland sites the point where the political poem breaks the horizon of
received opinion firmly upon the concept of the artist'sself-consciousnessin
the act of representing experience. She declares: '[T]he political poem [...]
is not really a public poem at all. If it is worthwhile, it is a rebalancing of
the perceived relation of power between an inner and an outer world: a
re-aligningof them so that one can comment on the other and not crush it',40
and 'so that the fracture in one annotates the wound in the other'.41
In the true political poem, material is sexualized rather than eroticized.
The sexualization of material recognizes the involvement of the desiring
poet-subject: it is 'integralto the poet's perspective and stance [and] it there-
fore becomes part of voice and argument'. Boland's understanding of the
criteria of the political poem - to which her own early poetry such as 'The
War Horse' (C.P., p. 28)42 and much other Irish poetry fails to live up -is
finally offered by her as a formulawhose epigrammaticforce in itself suggests
the pressure under which the belief it announces was shaped: 'I do not be-
lieve the political poem can be written with truth and effect unless the self
who writes that poem -a self in which sexuality must be a factor- is seen
to be in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessnesswith which
the political poem is so concerned.'43
'At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town' (C.P.,p. 185; I994) fulfils the above
criteria for the political poem in the way it manages its theme of the artist's
relation to the icon of nation. The figure of the swan at the poem's centre
symbol of shape-changing in Irish mythology - represents both nationalist
resistance to history (understood as time in linear developmental progress)
and its re-entry to that history. The swan here points towards its two
37 Boland, ObjectLessons,p. I91.
38 Deborah McWilliams Consalvo, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', Studies,81.321 (Spring I992),
89-I00
39 (p- 97)-
Allen-Randolph, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', p. 122.
40 Eavan Boland, 'P.B.S. Choice Spring I994', P.B.S. Bulletin,I60 (Spring I994), pp. I-2.
41 Boland, ObjectLessons,p. I90. The concept of fracture annotating wound is a synopsis of Boland's
position in the essay 'Outside History' where the intersection of the defeats of womanhood and the
suffering of a nation are suggested as liberating (ObjectLessons,p. 148).
42 For Boland's criticism of 'The War Horse', see
43 ObjectLessons,pp. 175-79.
Boland, ObjectLessons,p. 185.
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 87

authorizing legends in the Irish nationalist consciousness: the Children of

Lir,44and (via Yeats's famous poem on the initiation of epoch-changing
violence), Leda. Both these legends treat the issue of sexual passion and its
misdirection, and both suggest the female figure they invoke as at once the
agent and the victim of violence as she mediates in myth the conditions
of territorial warfare. The poet-speaker in the poem represents herself as
intimate with the problematic processes of such emblem-formation. She
suggests the idea of her own and other pens' frighteninglypervasivepower in
the figure of the glass-blowerwho 'takes a pole I from the earth's I | core'
and shapes the 'molten globe' before he 'lays I the rod on its spindle'. The
result is a glass artefact in which the image of the swan, woman, and nation
are trapped.
That this entrapment extends from artefact to the reality it represents is
suggested in the poem's turn to the image of the mated pair of actual swans
on the closed-in waterways of the border county where the poem is set. The
speaker'sconcern is with the ignorance displayed by these real swans, whose
'blind grace' as they 'sail [...] their own I images' is productive of that
form of narcissisticself-reflectionfrom which is obliterated the capacity for
self-reflexivity. In other words, they refuse the knowledge that they are
'entering the legend of | themselves' in the shape of artefact. The real swans
do not counteract their emblematic rhetorical glass counterparts created in
violence, but rather grant permission for these emblems through their blind
assumption of safety and self-containment.
Boland, however, then reverses the poem's direction as she challenges the
notion of any absolute distinction between narcissistic self-reflection and
accurate self-representationas options available to the 'real' swans as the
poem's subject. In the line, 'reflectionis the first I I myth of loss', she suggests
as two points on the same continuum, the true mirroringof 'actual flesh' and
the shattering of that secure identity in order to blow it into an entirely new
shape. (This continuum is further suggested in the poem in the dual sustain-
ing and disruptingof the mother-daughterrelationship as her children both
accompany and 'turn away' from their mother in their fascination with the
example of the manipulativepower of the glass blower, as they, like him and
like her, 'garner [...] | grindstone and fire' in the mirror of the text.) Thus
Boland re-evaluates the assumption underlying much of her earlier work up
to the early I98os, that an 'enclosed waterway' (such as the domestic home)
in which 'true' self-representationwould be possible, could counteract the
misrepresentation in art and national culture of the female self. The only
effective counteraction is the attempted re-direction on one's own terms of

44 In the story 'The Children of Lir', Aoife, going to attend the Feast of Age, asks her attendants to kill
her step-children and when they refuse, turns the children into swans. They cannot be released from the
spell until a southern princess marries a northern prince. (See Peter Beresford Ellis, Dictionaryof Irish
Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I99I).
88 EavanBolandandAuthoriy

those processes of misrepresentation with which one also acknowledges

complicity. Thus the swans' final action in floating away from the speaker's
offered warning will prove an act of wise innocence as the birds '[take] no
care not to splinter' and 'show [...] no fear' of the fact that they may be 'a
substance of [their] own I future form, both I I fraction and refraction'.45
Boland's equivocal attitude to the Irish poetry tradition is indicated in her
coming to terms with the figure of the swan in this poem. Boland in one
breath condemns the Irish literary tradition for its imposition of exile on its
women practitionersby subtly requiring them to devalue their own experi-
ence as fit subject for poetry and become 'honorary male poet[s]',46and on
the other hand values that tradition for its recognition of exile, its 'response
[...] to the intolerable weight of the past and a present sense of the irrecov-
erable',47a recognition which is fundamental to Boland's own aesthetic. Her
concern not to take up a separatiststance within Irish poetrythus arises from
her understanding that, as James Clarence Mangan knew, it is possible for
the artist to make the larger Irish experience one's personal myth because it
closely matches the self in terms of estrangement.48Her aesthetic's funda-
mental trust in the act of 'negotiat[ing] an experience of defeat into one of
articulationand recovery' is a developmental route which shares an import-
ant border with the Irish tradition against which Boland has long defined
herself.49The tracing of that jointly shared border is brought to fruition
in her 1998 collection, The Lost Land,where the marked reconciliation by
Boland with the very forces of post-colonialism which incorporated and
silenced women in the Irish tradition is a key development in her aesthetic.50
The long poem 'Anna Liffey' (C.P., p. I99; I994) powerfully glosses the
radical balancing of continuity and discontinuity of identity which I argue
in this essay to be the key to Boland's overall work. In 'Anna Liffey' this
balance is symbolized by the river of the poem's title which remains itself
by continually emptying itself into the Irish sea. Hence the poem describes
the ideal cohering self ('One body. One spirit.| One place. One name'), as
constituted in terms of 'Fractions'. In the context of this confirmation that
personal identity is guaranteed by its own dissipation, the fact of a public

45 The fact that the swans are

paired for life is a further instance of this 'reflection' of self which is
ultimately
46
enabling.
47
Allen-Randolph, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', p. 118.
Eavan Boland, 'Time, Memory and Obsession', PN Review, I8.2 (I991), I8-24 (p. 22). See also p. 21.
48
See Marilyn Reizbaum, 'An Interview with Eavan Boland', Contemporagy Literature,30.4 (1989),471-79
(p. 473); Deborah Tall, 'Q. & A. with Eavan Boland', IrishLiterarySupplement, 7.2 (i988), 39-40 (p. 39);
Boland, 'The Serinette Principle', p. 24, especially Boland's comment on Sappho. In Ireland, Boland's
work implies, the myth of a coherent self will be usefully counteracted by the myth of place with its
emphasis on dislocation and 'places of the mind'. In relation to this, see Boland's emphasis on her
childhood years in London, New York, and Dublin, and of her move to the unfinished Dublin suburb
after her marriage (ObjectLessons,pp. 35-37, I54-57, 159-60).
49
Boland, 'Time, Memory and Obsession', p. 21.
50 See Catriona
Clutterbuck, 'The Trustworthiness of Treachery' (review article on Eavan Boland,
The LostLand,IrishUniversityReview,29.2 (1999), 406-09.
 CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK 89

identity in equivalent dissolution becomes allowable, and so, at last, 'The

nation which eludes' the speaker can finally make sense. She can finally say:
Make a nationwhat you will
Makeof the past
Whatyou can
There is now
A womanin a doorway.
Boland has never been surer than in this poem of her own representative
significance, because this is a significance which is guaranteed by its own
cancellation. The grammatical tense used in the final lines of the poem
indicatesjust this co-joining of presence and loss of identity:

In the end
Everythingthat burdenedand distinguishedme
Will be lost in this:
I was a voice.

This essay has argued that the sexualization of material, where the woman
or male poet appears in the doorway between the public and private zones of
their poem, is what happens at the centre of the diptych of artistic creation
where that poem comes into being. For Boland, vision and experience, male
and female creative principles, myth and history, all meet in the achieved
poem at a fluid location between the dream state and the awakened state
(vividly presented in 'The Journey', as we saw), and there they together
generate a 'sense of place' for poet and readers: '[A] sense of place can
happen at the very borders of myth and history. In the first instance [myth,
or the claims of the poet's vision of experience] there are the healing repeti-
tions, the technology of propitiation. In the second [history, or the claims
of the originary experience itselfl there is the consciousness of violent
and random event. In the zone between them something happens. Ideas of
belonging take on the fluidity of sleep [...] And here, on the edge of dream,
is a place in which I locate myself as a poet.'51In this fluid sexual space of the
poem, distance is simultaneouslydefended and made irrelevantbetween the
original experience and the poet's vision of it, between history and myth,
between female and male creative principles, as form transmutes the poet's
vision or imagination of the experience of the other into a new, broader
understanding of the original experience, in which the reader as well as the
poet herself can partake. The second half of the poetic process, the matching
section of the diptych, comprises the effects of truly representing the act of
imagination or borrowing of experience in poetic form, as described to date

51 Boland, ObjectLessons,p. 172.

90 EavanBolandandAuthority

in this essay. This second 'results' stage is suggested by Boland when she
compares the serinette, which was a '[s]mall domestic barrel organ' made
'for the express purpose of teaching caged birds to sing', with the lyric
impulse in poetry which likewise 'reaches out to a perceptive area [in
the poet and reader] that has fallen silent'.52The barrel organ corresponds
to a particular poetic form, and the bird is the perception of experience
re-activated in the human (poet, or reader) who enters into contact with it.
The overall diptych model can be summarizedthen, as follows:experience
(not necessarilypersonal)leads to vision (necessarilypersonal)which leads to
poetic form, that in turn leads to a radicallyinter-personalre-vision of expe-
rience, creating community out of a prior necessary conflict of interest. The
diptych model is mirrored in Boland's overview of connections between key
stages in the process and the effect of writing poetry: she describes that
process as 'the wonderful relation of routine to ritual, ritual to rite and rite to
metaphor', or, in terms of the diptych model, lived experience to experience
that includes a vision of itself, to the formal incarnation of that vision in text.
The second half of the diptych is suggested in her further remark:'Through
the rite of poetry we are led to the ritual and from the ritual to the reality.'53
This re-engagement with reality, as we have seen her poetry powerfully
exemplify, is the true promise of art.

52
Boland, 'The Serinette Principle', p. 20.
53 Boland, 'The Need to Be Ordinary' (1988), repr. in InvisibleDublin:A JourneyThrough
Dublin'sSuburbs,
ed. by Dermot Bolger (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, I99), pp. i59-67 (p. I67).