by Eavan Boland
EAVAN BOLAND
New Selected Poems
For Kevin, Sarah, Eavan and Éamonn
Acknowledgements
23 Poems was first published in 1962 by Gallagher Press, Dublin; New Territory in 1967 by Allen Figgis, Dublin; The War Horse in 1975 by Gollancz, London; In Her Own Image in 1980 by Arlen House, Dublin.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
from New Territory 1967
Athene’s Song
New Territory
From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin
Yeats in Civil War
Belfast vs Dublin
from The War Horse 1975
The War Horse
The Famine Road
Child of Our Time
Suburban Woman
The Laws of Love
O Fons Bandusiae
Cyclist with Cut Branches
Song
from In Her Own Image 1980
Anorexic
In Her Own Image
Making Up
Tirade for the Mimic Muse
from Night Feed 1982
Night Feed
Domestic Interior
Energies
Monotony
Endings
After a Childhood Away from Ireland
The Muse Mother
Woman in Kitchen
Patchwork or the Poet’s Craft
Degas’s Laundresses
It’s a Woman’s World
The New Pastoral
‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’
The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish
from The Journey 1987
I
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening
Mise Eire
The Oral Tradition
Fever
Lace
I Remember
The Bottle Garden
Suburban Woman: A Detail
The Briar Rose
The Women
Nocturne
II
The Journey
Envoi
III
Listen. This is the Noise of Myth
An Irish Childhood in England: 1951
Fond Memory
The Emigrant Irish
The Glass King
from Outside History 1990
I Object Lessons
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
The Rooms of Other Women Poets
The Shadow Doll
The Latin Lesson
Bright-Cut Irish Silver
II Outside History: A sequence
I The Achill Woman
II A False Spring
III The Making of an Irish Goddess
IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland
V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God
VI The Photograph on My Father’s Desk
VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History.
VIII An Old Steel Engraving
IX In Exile
X We Are Always Too Late
XI What We Lost
XII Outside History
III Distances
Distances
Midnight Flowers
Our Origins Are in the Sea
What Love Intended
from In a Time of Violence 1994
The Singers
I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence
1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited
2 The Death of Reason
3 March 1 1847. By the First Post
4 In a Bad Light
5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin
6 Inscriptions
7 Beautiful Speech
II Legends
This Moment
Love
The Pomegranate
Moths
In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own
The Parcel
Lava Cameo
Legends
III Anna Liffey
Anna Liffey
Time and Violence
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
from The Lost Land 1998
I Colony: A Sequence
1 My Country in Darkness
2 The Harbour
3 Witness
4 Daughters of Colony
5 Imago
6 The Scar
7 City of Shadows
8 Unheroic
9 The Colonists
10 A Dream of Colony
11 A Habitable Grief
12 The Mother Tongue
II The Lost Land
The Lost Land
Mother Ireland
The Blossom
Tree of Life
The Necessity for Irony
Heroic
Whose?
from Code 2001
I Marriage
I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission
II Against Love Poetry
III The Pinhole Camera
IV Quarantine
V Embers
VI Then
VII First Year
VIII Once
IX Thankëd be Fortune
X A Marriage for the Millennium
XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary
II Code
Code
Limits
Limits 2
How We Made a New Art on Old Ground
Making Money
Exile! Exile!
Is It Still the Same
Irish Poetry
from Domestic Violence 2007
Domestic Violence
1 Domestic Violence
2 How the Dance Came to the City
3 How It Was Once In Our Country
4 Still Life
5 Silenced
6 Histories
7 Wisdom
8 Irish Interior
9 In Our Own Country
Letters to the Dead
An Elegy for my Mother In Which She Scarcely Appears
Amber
And Soul
On This Earth
Letters to the Dead
To Memory
Becoming the Hand of John Speed
Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet
Becoming the Hand of John Speed
Violence Against Women
Instructions
In Coming Days
New Poems
Art of Empire
The Long Evenings of their Leavetakings
Re-reading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in a Changed Ireland
As
Becoming Anne Bradstreet
Cityscape
A Woman Without a Country
Index of First Lines
Index of Titles
About the Author
Also by Eavan Boland from Carcanet Press
Copyright
Author’s Note
This New Selected is unusual in one respect: it follows a Collected Poems, rather than preceding it. I have included poems from all of my previous volumes, beginning with New Territory, taking a broader sampling from some than from others. I have also included some new, as yet unpublished poems. In a small number of poems I have made minor adjustments to punctuation and layout compared with the previous versions.
Eavan Boland
Stanford/Dublin 2013
from NEW TERRITORY
1967
Athene’s Song
for my father
From my father’s head I sprung
Goddess of the war, created
Partisan and soldiers’ physic –
My symbols boast and brazen gong –
Until I made
in Athens wood
Upon my knees a new music.
When I played my pipe of bone,
Robbed and whittled from a stag,
Every bird became a lover
Every lover to its tone
Found the truth of song and brag;
Fish sprung in the full river.
Peace became the toy of power
When other noises broke my sleep.
Like dreams I saw the hot ranks
And heroes in another flower
Than any there; I dropped my pipe
Remembering their shouts, their thanks.
Beside the water, lost and mute,
Lies my pipe and like my mind
Remains unknown, remains unknown
And in some hollow taking part
With my heart against my hand
Holds its peace and holds its own.
New Territory
Several things announced the fact to us:
The captain’s Spanish tears
Falling like doubloons in the headstrong light,
And then of course the fuss –
The crew jostling and interspersing cheers
With wagers. Overnight,
As we went down to our cabins, nursing the last
Of the grog, talking as usual of conquest,
Land hove into sight.
Frail compasses and trenchant constellations
Brought us as far as this,
And now air and water, fire and earth
Stand at their given stations
Out there, and are ready to replace
This single desperate width
Of ocean. Why do we hesitate? Water and air
And fire and earth and therefore life are here.
And therefore death.
Out of the dark man comes to life and into it
He goes and loves and dies,
(His element being the dark and not the light of day)
So the ambitious wit
Of poets and exploring ships have been his eyes –
Riding the dark for joy –
And so Isaiah of the sacred text is eagle-eyed because
By peering down the unlit centuries
He glimpsed the holy boy.
From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin
Dressed in the colours of a country day –
Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies –
Chardin’s peasant woman
Is to be found at all times in her short delay
Of dreams, her eyes mixed
Between love and market, empty flagons of wine
At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed
Her limbs in colour, and her heart in line.
In her right hand, the hindlegs of a hare
Peep from a cloth sack; through the door
Another woman moves
In painted daylight; nothing in this bare
Closet has been lost
Or changed. I think of what great art removes:
Hazard and death, the future and the past,
This woman’s secret history and her loves –
And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining
She has just come back, where men and women
Congregate and go
Among the produce, learning to live from morning
To next day, linked
By a common impulse to survive, although
In surging light they are single and distinct,
Like birds in the accumulating snow.
Yeats in Civil War
Presently a strange thing happened:
I began to smell honey in places
where honey could not be.
In middle age you exchanged the sandals
Of a pilgrim for a Norman keep
In Galway. Civil war started, vandals
Sacked your country, made off with your sleep;
Somehow you arranged your escape
Aboard a spirit-ship which every day
Hoisted sail out of fire and rape.
On that ship your mind was stowaway.
The sun mounted on a wasted place,
But the wind at every door and turn
Blew the smell of honey in your face
Where there was none. Whatever we may learn
You are its sum, struggling to survive –
A fantasy of honey your reprieve.
Belfast vs Dublin
for Derek Mahon
Into this city of largesse
You carried clever discontent,
And now, the budget of your time here spent,
Let us not mince the word: this is no less
Than halfway towards the end. Gathering
In a rag tied to a stick, all in confusion,
Dublin reverence and Belfast irony –
Now hoist with your conclusion.
Cut by the throats before we spoke
One to another, yet we breast
The dour line of North and South, pressed
Into action by the clock. Here we renounce
All dividend except the brilliant quarrel
Of our towns: mine sports immoral
Courtiers in unholy waste, but your unwitty
Secret love for it is Belfast city.
We have had time to talk, and strongly
Disagree about the living out
Of life. There was no need to shout.
Rightly or else quite wrongly
We have run out of time, if not of talk.
Let us then cavalierly fork
Our ways, since we, and all unknown,
Have called into question one another’s own.
from THE WAR HORSE
1975
The War Horse
This dry night, nothing unusual
About the clip, clop, casual
Iron of his shoes as he stamps death
Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.
I lift the window, watch the ambling feather
Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether
In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,
Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head
Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.
Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn –
Of distant interest like a maimed limb,
Only a rose which now will never climb
The stone of our house, expendable, a mere
Line of defence against him, a volunteer
You might say, only a crocus its bulbous head
Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.
But we, we are safe, our unformed fear
Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care
If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted
Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?
He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge,
Threatening; neighbours use the subterfuge
Of curtains; he stumbles down our short street
Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,
Then to breathe relief lean on the sill
And for a second only my blood is still
With atavism. That rose he smashed frays
Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days
Of burned countryside, illicit braid:
A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.
The Famine Road
‘Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones,
these Irish, give them no coins at all; their bones
need toil, their characters no less.’ Trevelyan’s
seal blooded the deal table. The Relief
Committee deliberated: ‘Might it be safe,
Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force
from nowhere, going nowhere of course?’
‘one out of every ten and then
another third of those again
women – in a case like yours.’
Sick, directionless they worked; fork,
stick
were iron years away; after all could
they not blood their knuckles on rock, suck
April hailstones for water and for food?
Why for that, cunning as housewives, each eyed –
as if at a corner butcher – the other’s buttock.
‘anything may have caused it, spores,
a childhood accident; one sees
day after day these mysteries.’
Dusk: they will work tomorrow without him.
They know it and walk clear; he has become
a typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although
he shares it with some there. No more than snow
attends its own flakes where they settle
and melt, will they pray by his death rattle.
‘You never will, never you know
but take it well woman, grow
your garden, keep house, good-bye.’
‘It has gone better than we expected, Lord
Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured
in one; from parish to parish, field to field,
the wretches work till they are quite worn,
then fester by their work; we march the corn
to the ships in peace; this Tuesday I saw bones
out of my carriage window, your servant Jones.’
‘Barren, never to know the load
of his child in you, what is your body
now if not a famine road?’
Child of Our Time
for Aengus
Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason,
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.
We who should have known how to instruct
