Eavan Boland

The Irish poet Eavan Boland died suddenly of a stroke two days ago. She’d returned to Ireland from Stanford where she ran the creative writing department when the university sent faculty and students home this spring because of the Covid virus. I knew Eavan because we lived for several years in the same group of condos on campus and met at the recycling bins, or at events, a poetry reading, say, at which Eavan would deliver one of her lucid introductions. Or I’d run into her on campus, heading ‘home’—at least so far as ‘home’ was her campus condo—or to the little grocery shop tucked into the law school residences; usually she was listening to her earphones. We also met, infrequently, to gossip (Eavan was a great gossip) over coffee. She was an easy woman to talk to. She was a busy woman, at events most evenings during term, returning to Ireland, her true home and background to most of her poems, when term ended.

I’ve always admired Eavan’s poetry. We shared a generation, and the concerns and frustrations of women of that generation, including the domestic ones, which she both celebrated and decried. She was wonderful at back gardens ( ‘The War Horse’) and kitchens full of humming shaking white machines. More and more the personal reached for the universal, a story about her grandmother, say (see below), widening to the socio-politico-historical domain. But always she was a lyricist, a writer of songs, the elegaic a constant register (once I said I like humour in poems, and she looked at me, startled: ‘I don’t have humour in my poems.’) Never a heavy line, a word too many. I bought her books as they came out; I am eager to see the next, and as it turns out, last one, History, announced in this week’s New Yorker.

Coincidently the New Yorker has one of Eavan’s poems in the current issue: ‘Eviction.’ I recommend you listen to her read it on the New Yorker website.

Eviction

By Eavan Boland

(New Yorker, 27 April 2020)

Back from Dublin, my grandmother
finds an eviction notice on her door.
Now she is in court for rent arrears.
The lawyers are amused.
These are the Petty Sessions,
this is Drogheda, this is the Bank Holiday.
Their comments fill a column in the newspaper.
Was the notice well served?
Was it served at all?
Is she a weekly or a monthly tenant?
In which one of the plaintiffs’ rent books
is she registered?
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.
Nor does it know the answer as to why
on a winter evening
in a modern Ireland
I linger over the page of the Drogheda
Argus and Leinster Journal, 1904,
knowing as I do that my attention has
no agency, none at all. Nor my rage.

I notice, for myself, the plainness of the language, the expert handling of line, the simplicity of the syntax, anaphora, the way closure is built up through rhyme and half-rhyme: ‘page’…’agency’…’rage’; the repetition of the sound ‘g..’ hard and soft, as the poem is hard and soft.