Eavan Boland’s “Quarantine” offers an ideal introduction to her poetry.
Toward the end of the poem she writes, “There is no place here for the inexact/praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.” Boland refuses to gloss over the story she makes us witness with her. Instead, in this and other poems, she stays present amidst the most terrible details.
“Quarantine” is from her collection Against Love Poetry. It seems incongruous at first that the author of this poem would define herself as against love poetry. But in the title poem from that collection she writes, “It is to mark the contradictions of a daily love that I have written this.” Boland isn’t against love poetry so much as against sentimentalizing relationships. She is willing to witness the contradictions of a daily love, of daily life, not in spite of but because of how difficult this sometimes is. To do less is to trivialize human experience.
Boland is also deeply aware that everything has a history. For her, attention to the things of this world includes attention to the history they carry. This includes the history carried in the body. It can be public or private, national or familial, but in Boland it is always personal, and she makes it personal for her readers.
Many of our bravest and most influential witnesses to the interconnection between the personal and historical have been women: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton among others. Boland is squarely in this lineage. William Butler Yeats’ “terrible beauty” in not an abstract concept for them. These women have all understood that the smallest details of domestic life are intricately interwoven with the largest historical issues of their times.
Boland’s history is Irish. She came of age in a land still tormented by “the troubles,” and under the influence of an ancient bardic tradition dominated by giant male figures like Yeats. In her memoir, A Journey with Two Maps, she writes movingly of her struggle to forge an identity for herself as a woman poet in the shadow of that imposing tradition. When she went looking for other models her search led her to contemporary women poets writing in America, where she now lives and teaches much of the year.
What she learned from these women transformed the tradition she carried (and still carries) with her. She writes: “I came to believe there is no meaning to an art form with its grand designs unless it allows the humane to shape the invented, the way gravity is said to bend starlight.”
To hear Boland read “Quarantine,” click on the image below.
Watch Poet Eavan Boland Reads ‘Quarantine’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
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[…] but with history. Like another 2012 Festival Poet recently featured on Poetry Friday, Irish poet Eavan Boland, Finney is acutely aware that the past is alive in the present. In some ways, many of these poems […]