Andrew Wheelhouse
posted 2 October 2007

There is a fine line between writing minimalist, lyrical poetry of the sort normally purveyed by Heaney and Larkin, and writing something that degenerates into a morass of opaque, self-indulgent nonsense. Fortunately, Eavan Boland is in the former camp with her new collection, ‘Domestic Violence’. Her perseverance and attention to detail makes for a searingly powerful work that seeps into the subconscious of the reader.

What is intriguing about Boland’s poems is that, like Heaney or the plays of Friel, they have a way of reaching to readers across the Irish Sea. Her enquiring, probing instincts as a poet pull away from the seemingly traditional Brit-bashing of the Irish arts. But it would be foolish to think that Domestic Violence ignores the past. Like most Irish writers, the poet is acutely aware of how intertwined past and present can be in Ireland, 'as though the past could be present and memory itself / a Baltic honey'. Rather, she takes a more mixed approach to Ireland’s downtrodden past, reflecting in ‘The Nineteenth Century Poets’ that such a repressed past had resulted in modern Irish poets being left with the legacy of 'The toxic lyric./ The poem for which there is no antidote'.

That said, closer inspection of the various sections of Domestic Violence reveals a poet who, while eschewing the high drama and tragedy of the Irish poetic tradition, is still melodramatic in her own quiet way. In the opening section of the anthology, she explores the relationship between men and women throughout history, using in ‘Silenced’, the gruesome, classical myth of the rape of Philomel by Tereus as a way of reflecting on the feelings of anguish and injustice that resonate throughout Irish history;

An old radio
was there in the room as well, telling its own
unregarded story of violation.

Now she is rinsing the distances
with greenish silks. Now, for the terrible foreground,
she is pulling own a crimson thread.

Other poems like ‘Becoming the Hand of John Speed’ reveal that Boland, like Hugh, Friel’s tragically erudite and constantly inebriated schoolmaster in Translations, is acutely aware of the role the arts play in shaping Ireland, in the absence of riches or grand buildings there is only, 'my pen moving over a swerve of contour, / my ink stroke adding an acre of ocean'.

Boland’s melodrama remains one of the armchair though, as the collection entitled ‘Indoors’ illustrates;

I was an indoor nature poet,
safe in my countryside
of handles and entrances, my pastoral of inland elements.

One of the most powerful traits of Boland’s work is that despite her restraint, there is a deep well of feeling behind her work, that on occasion rises to the surface in words that reflect a sense of middle-class suburban ordinariness about her life, but which feel all the more intensely sincere nonetheless:

I can hear
the river in those first days of April, making
its way through the dusk,
having learned to speak the way through the dusk,
having learned
to speak the way I once spoke, saying
as if I didn’t love you,
as if I wouldn’t die for you.

Of course no master is without their faults and I feel Boland’s is with just how seemingly cryptic her short, dense verses can be. For instance, in ‘Indoors’;

There is a place where a fable starts – where a god
proves he is a god by adding
not simply wings and sinews to his shoulders.

Fables? Gods? Sinews? Together they provide a striking image, but do they provide much meaning? Depending on your mood and tastes you may find parts of this collection infuriatingly opaque or deliciously ambiguous. This is a very cerebral and introspective form of poetry. Active characters rarely seem to intrude, for the most part serving as props or muses for the poet’s ruminations. Thoughts drift this way and that, constantly shifting, but not in anyway carelessly put. They are powerful in their ability to make the reader look closer, but still somehow inspire emotion without demanding it.

As you may have gathered from the above quotes, what cannot be criticised is Boland’s style, which utilises such minimalist elegance when speaking, usually using nothing more complex than simple tercet stanzas or a comma. Her poems are those of the beautiful sentence, and feel full of the stuff of life, encompassing a lifetime of experiences that are sometimes indistinct and vague, and other times sharp, like snapshots, preserved forever in memory, like the eponymous mineral in ‘Amber’, 'a showing off of just how much / can be kept safe inside a flawed translucence'.

Of course, poetry, like most things, is down to matters of taste, and in the same way that poems often represent the prosaic ideas of poets condensed into a tiny amount of space, so the likes and dislikes of readers will often be focused onto those same tiny verses. Some critics will probably find her characteristic depiction of parts of suburban life, facile and banal. Boland’s style will seem for the most part, emotionally sterile and bland, perhaps pretentious in its aloofness and in the way the poet plays emotionally hard-to-get. I would disagree. Emotional incontinence in my mind does not qualify as good material for poetry and I admire the care, and consistent quality that have gone into this work, albeit perhaps, as the latest in a long line of carefully consistent works, written in a similar fashion.