ON EAVAN BOLAND’S THE
HISTORIANS
By David Hackbridge Johnson
The cover of
Eavan Boland's last book of poetry goes:
THE
THE
THE
HISTO
HISTO
HISTO
RIANS
RIANS
RIANS
which might suggest those humorous textual puns
Edwin Morgan wrote in the 1970s. It works as a visual echo, and a verbal
one if you say it out loud, slowly, under one of the arches of the Henry Prince
Estate just down the road from here. It's also a clue as to what type of
history the historians tell of in the book – not that of the panoply of battles
and kings, but of half-forgotten echoes: the things mothers and children did,
what the weather did, what a spinning wheel sounded like, how such things got
to the page before failing words lost them for good. These echoes come
forward syllable by syllable haltingly in a cavernous chamber of the poet's
past; the many enjambments of the verse ensure this by resisting the temptation
to succumb to an easy melos.
Paradoxically Boland has made of such tenuous things a history more alive and
present than would a barrage of important dates and powerful personages.
In doing so she avoids the cosy nostalgia of ‘I-remember-when' poems, because
she isn't cosy, the memories don't snuggle up to her, in fact their fading
breath takes the breath out of her, as if in joining hands across so many
decades means remembered and rememberer can depart together in an invisible
present. Precisely here is where the reader feels that a poet's appeal
goes beyond mere personal experience and the smug supposition that somehow that
might be of interest to a reader, into a far more rich if rarefied realm of
poetic risk: the space where memory itself writes the fragments that
miraculously survive the relentless battering and erasure of information all
individuals must contend with. This is not so much a matter of choosing
but of catching on the wind the most transparent of pictures.
The first poem in the book, ‘The Fire Gilder’[1],
sets the tone of the entire collection. As the poet muses on the life of her mother, ‘What
she spent a lifetime forgetting / could be my subject’, the process of gilding
metal is used as a metaphor between memory and knowledge, and how the former is
volatile and the latter less so, and that there is risk inherent in this process:
‘the only thing is, it is extremely
dangerous.’
Boland does frame these poems within Ireland: ‘the
small fenced-in small towns of Leinster’, or as in the poem ‘Epithalamion’[2]
composed ‘in an Irish anywhere / that let too little light in for anyone to
see.’ The accent here is on the
obscurity of lives lived in places that are specific but can be taken all too
easily as generic or stereotypical.
Boland places poems where they might be anywhere due to the fading of
once clear memories – as if maps had lost over time the names of towns and
hills.
In a few short
phrases from ‘The Barograph’[3],
Boland can encapsulate millennia of Irish weather as an epic poem of changing
conditions: ‘Yet / every day the page was inked, / the pen still ready to be /
what it had always been: / scribe of our Irish climate, / knowing no suffering,
just / the hours as they opened, closed, // opened.’ Here Boland conjures entire vistas reaching
back into the centuries of Irish writing as if saturated in weather. A
history of a specific climate and how that makes both individuals and a nation.
As if knowing
the talismanic powers of a single word, Boland can utter one and an entire past
is illumined. For instance, in the poem ‘The
Light We Lost’[4]: ‘Repeat
the word sainthood and we are / in an
old island / in a time warp of tallow – // candle smoke rising towards / the
porcelain / yellow faces of the sanctified.’
Notice how the verse and line breaks interfere with an otherwise easy
scansion, as if difficulty is thus inscribed in memory.
The poem ‘Anonymous’[5]
questions whether fragmentary memory constitutes any kind of knowledge at all. She remembers a near relative carrying
communications ‘to the far corners / of Haddington Road / and O'Connell Street.’ What is in these messages? the reader
wonders, and so does the poet: ‘Then I ask myself, / what is it I know? / The
evening mist enfolds. / It is empty. That / is history. This / is only poetry.’
I'm loathe to unpack this poem too much as Boland expresses her thought so
succinctly but this reader is left with a sense of haunting, that real history
is that which we can't know. It is empty
and only the poem remains, like something breathed on glass.
The crux of the
entire collection lies in the poem ‘Eviction’[6],
where in analysing her reactions to memories of her grandmother being evicted
due to rent arrears, she ponders a sense of loss: ‘The case comes to an end, is
dismissed. / 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.’ We must recognise here that the nation
is that which finally arose after years of uprising and civil war. And yet the more homespun tragedy of a woman
in tears is somehow more powerful to the poet and renders grand themes mute by
comparison. I don't think Boland wishes to belittle the grand themes of
history, but she makes an appeal to the anonymous, the barely known, those whose
names now only crop up in the pages ‘of the Drogheda,
/ Argus and Leinster Journal’, newsprint memories that are almost
impossible to turn into flesh and blood.
Ireland's
status as the Emerald Isle is thus because it always rains there – the clouds
thinking about a deluge even when they aren't performing one. Boland has a poem called ‘Rain’[7]
that isn't just about the weather, it's about a language: ‘I always knew / rain
was a dialect I could listen to / on a winter night: its sibilance.’ But
this is no ordinary rain that saturates mortals. It is a rain that can pass through the thin
veil that separates the living from the dead: ‘I watch as twilight comes / to
the old graveyard above the main / road of our village, and I am glad for / whoever
lies there that this / elemental companion has not, / and never will, abandon
them.’ Notice that Boland doesn't name any specific people in the old
graveyard. She can make both a universal and an intimate point by describing
the action of this metaphysical rain that permeates all being and non-being.
As if to
emphasize this permeability between different states of birth and death, Boland's
poem, ‘This Garden’[8]
imagines the time just before she is born: ‘Until then, I cannot be alive. / Until
then, I have no need to remember.’ Significantly,
she surrounds this pre-birth memory with further images of the weather: and ‘of
small apples falling’ and where ‘Crab apples are littered / in the grass, their
skin torn by wild beaks.’
In one of the most subtle poems in the book, ‘Three
Crafts’[9],
Boland begins by evoking a spinning wheel with its spindle and legs and ‘small,
odd music – more a whirring really – / enough to cover up the sound / a tree
makes on a summer night.’ She moves from
the machinery that spins yarn to the machinery of the poet, hoping that ‘an
ocean cadence’ might come into her work and give it, ‘Its fall, its rise and
fall.’ The shared mechanics of spinning
and writing – we say ‘spinning a yarn’ as something storytellers do – bring to
the fore the idea of making – in Scots there are ‘makars’ of poetry. A garment of words.
There are two
poems which recall specific figures in Ireland's past. ‘Statue 2016’[10]
meditates on the statue of Constance Markievicz in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin,
a figure so important in Irish history that it seems extraordinary that her sculpted
head seems rinsed of thought and her name has been poured away due to the
ravages of the elements. With her
disappearing name goes an awareness of her history and even ‘the apple blossoms
of her native Magherlow.’[11] Boland creates out of the monument, a hieroglyph
of forgetting with the tragic implications therein.
The last poem
in the book is very much a public utterance, being called ‘Our Future Will
Become the Past of Other Women’[12]
‘commissioned by the Permanent Mission of Ireland, the United Nations and the
Royal Irish Academy to mark the centenary of Irish women exercising their right
to vote in 1918.’ Here we do get a roll
call of specific people (Constance Markievicz appears again) and Boland honours
them not only for the rights that they won so many years ago but for the way
they enter history, being ‘called to their duties / As new citizens to exercise
/ A hard-won right: this franchise.’ Although a public poem and therefore lacking
the extraordinary intimacy of the other poems in the book, Boland does attempt
to link the specificities of the poem with the shadows of the past: ‘If only we
could summon / Or see them these women / Foremothers of the nurture / And
dignity that will come / To all of us from this day / We could say across the
century / To each one – give me your hand: / It has written our future.’
In her offering
of these tenderest of poems, it is hard not to imagine Boland as the fulcrum
through which they pass in an onward journey beyond her; she passed away six
months before the collection was published. Valedictory poems, yet
hopeful in that what can be gathered in these moments recalled, are the most
important parts of us, the most human, the most imperishable. I wonder – even now – does Eavan Boland feel
the rain coming through the soft earth?
©DHJ xii.2024
[1]
Eavan Boland, The Historians,
Carcanet, 2020, p. 3.
[2]
Ibid. p. 6.
[3]
Ibid. p. 7.
[4]
Ibid. p. 9.
[5]
Ibid. p. 12.
[6]
Ibid. p. 14.
[7]
Ibid. p. 23.
[9]
Ibid. p. 34.
[10]
Ibid. p. 49.
[11]
I can’t trace this town on a modern map of Ireland, although there are plenty
of places beginning ‘Magher’. Magherlow
is mentioned as one of many towns taken by Lord Mountjoy during the Nine Years
War between 1593-1603 – see Alexander
M. Sullivan, The Story of Ireland, 1892, p. 308.
For a potential modern place equivalent I offer, merely as conjecture,
Magherally, which means ‘apple-tree plain’ – apple blossoms being present in
Boland’s poem.
[12]
Ibid. p. 61.