A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

gwen — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

“But if the tradition would not admit me, could I change its rules of admission?” Eavan Boland asks in her new book, A Journey with Two Maps. This volume honors the accumulated change wrought by earlier woman poets, the self-claimed permission for women to write identities outside of the feminine, and the female victory of bringing the ordinary into the canon. She also proselytizes for a transcendence of the binary: that the writer can perceive the contradictory aspects of poetry’s history and practice and reconcile them through her work, and then use these two maps to reach a poetic destination.

Boland frames critical reviews of women poets - including Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks – with an opening autobiographical essay on her perception of the creative process as influenced by her painter mother, and closes with a “Letter to a Young Woman Poet.” She presents insights of her youth, such as the realization that the sublime is not some entity storming through the heavens in order to overwhelm those who make art, but rather, their creation. Boland also describes her appreciation of Plath, not as the scribe of self-inflicted internal terrors, but as a champion of the domestic, wisely selecting Plath’s explication of “Nick and the Candlestick”: “A mother nurses her baby son by candlelight, and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world’s ill, does redeem her share of it.”

She acknowledges that her appreciation of Brooks grew from perceiving her as an author in the tradition of urban documentarians – like Hughes, Eliot, Sandburg, and Crane – to a “critique of race and nation,” and acknowledges that this understanding was cautiously negotiated through qualified comparison with her experience of Irish colonialism, not through some claim of instant affinity. I was also introduced to Charlotte Mew, a writer who I spontaneously liked due to her wry to response to the mundane social inquiry, “Are you Charlotte Mew?”: “Unfortunately, yes.” She also wrote the lines, “It may be that what Father said is true, If things are so it does not matter why.”

A Journey with Two Maps, Boland illuminates, in prose both fluid and lucid, the reasons why, pertinent to the efforts of woman writers, and the significance of the matter.

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, April 28th 2011

New Collected Poems

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Eavan Boland

W.W. Norton

Combining eleven of Eavan Boland’s books, New Collected Poems presents readers with her finest work. Boland, a contemporary Irish poet, guides readers across thirty years of her work in this 307 page tome. During the journey, one begins to traverse tradition, grasp snippets of myth, and peer inside the life of this extraordinary woman.

Most of Boland’s poems are written in traditional forms, which give her work a smooth consistency. The reader has a map of what to expect in terms of sound, but is still surprised line by line. Boland has a keen ability to construct proper syntax while remaining consistent in sound. She employs this technique in all her poems, even the ones that break from tradition.

While many of her poems explore Irish politics and myth, Boland also focuses on issues of feminism. In “The Other Woman,” she describes the role of the abandoned wife. With eloquence she captures the heartache of infidelity with lines like: "I know you have a world I cannot share/Where a woman waits for you, beautiful/Young no doubt, protected in your care/From stiffening and wrinkling." In “It’s a Woman’s World” Boland speaks to all women of the sad fact that not much has changed for women over the course of history and ends the poem with “a burning plume/she’s no fire-eater/just my frosty neighbor/coming home,” which speaks to many women's contentment with their lot in life who live without a fire for something greater.

Boland holds mastery over her words and New Collected Poems is a travel through sound and thought.

Written by: Michelle Tooker, March 13th 2010