EAVAN BOLAND

(b. 1944)
15 / 04 / 2011

EAVAN BOLAND
womens voices in Ireland are under-represented: an intensely patriarchal public and private ethos, intensified by religious patriarchy a tradition of male writing about women in which religious and nationalist iconography represented them as passive, emblematic of territory Ireland traditionally portrayed as a woman (Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Mother Ireland or Dark Rosaleen)

EAVAN BOLAND

poetry as a male preserve

Boland started writing in the early 1960s

movement for womens rights in Ireland (the 2nd wave of feminism) I know now that I began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed.

- women poets appearing together with a broader

EAVAN BOLAND
The best thing about your work is that you would never know it was by a woman. genderless poems - attempting to write like a man - compelled to write under the enormous influence of W. B. Yeats
-

EAVAN BOLAND

inspiration in everyday life and in ordinary details opposing the cherished stereotypical images which represented women only as objects of the male gaze

Whom can female poets invoke for inspiration?

EAVAN BOLAND
Im not your muse, not that creature In the painting, with the beautiful body, Venus on the half-shell. Can You not see Im an ordinary woman Tied to the moons phases, bloody Six days in twenty-eight? ... Paula Meehan, Not Your Muse

EAVAN BOLAND

set out to redefine and explore her female identity in the poem

women have gone from being the objects of the Irish poem to being the authors of it In the Irish poem I had inherited you could have a political murder but not a baby, you could have the Dublin hills but not the suburbs under them.

EAVAN BOLAND

recording those aspects of life that have been marginalized in terms of history and poetic tradition the neglected and un-recorded

The I-voice of her poems always and exclusively that of the woman who acquires her own voice, turning from an object to the subject of the poem.

OUTSIDE HISTORY
The Irish woman has always existed some place outside history, not participating in allegedly important historical events made exclusively by men

As far as history goes we were never on the scene of the crime

EAVAN BOLAND

a huge difference between the two sides of history:

the officially known and recognized history

his story the story of women traditionally existing somewhere outside the scope of Western history her story

EAVAN BOLAND

subverting the passive and voiceless images of Cathleen Ni Houlihan or Dark Rosaleen - the national emblems of Ireland refusing any identification with static and stereotypical images of the women fixed in timeless youth and beauty in the Irish poem

I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. Let me die (A Woman Painted)

EAVAN BOLAND

in many of her poems her lyric speakers are Boland herself - autobiographical elements the suburban and child-and-woman centred poetry a babys bottle, nappies, dishes, remnants of food etc.

the imagery which is not considered poetic enough (the demeaned, the neglected subject) often referred to as a domestic poet

EAVAN BOLAND
After a while I came to think of myself as an indoor nature poet. And my lexicon was the kettle and the steam, and the machine in the corner, and the kitchen, and the babys bottle. These were parts of my world. Not to write about them would have been artificial. Those objects were visible to me. They assumed importances. I felt about them, after a day spent in the house or with little children, exactly the same way the nature poet feels after taking the same walk for several days and seeing the same tree or the same bird.

EAVAN BOLAND

the world of domestic interiors becomes a poetic world with its own significance it is not less important than the outside urban or rural spaces inscribed in the poetry of other poets

EAVAN BOLAND

In Her Own Image (1980)

taboo subjects related to womens bodies: anorexia, mastectomy, domestic violence, masturbation or striptease

EAVAN BOLAND

Each of the poems plucks at a dark side of the body violence, self-suppression, mutilation. The lyric speaker still stood in almost the same place in the poem as he stood ... in Yeats time. That isnt where I stood or wanted to stand. I was still in the house, with small daughters. I was also in this country with its complicated silences about a womans body. And I wanted to write a book of the body. Not of my body, exactly. At least not in the autobiographical sense, since none of the circumstances of the book ever happened to me. But it was still a book of the body. A book of physical metaphors perhaps.

EAVAN BOLAND

the need to resist the ways in which the male lyric labels and idealises women her female speakers burdened by: - the beliefs of the Catholic church - the images of asexual beauties of Irish poetic tradition ready to confront the taboos deeply rooted in Irish society

EAVAN BOLAND
attempts to turn the trivial and private into universal and public perceiving and conveying women from a womans point of view