EAVAN BOLAND

(b. 1944)

13 / 01 / 2017

EAVAN BOLAND

womens voices in Ireland under-represented:

an intensely patriarchal public and private ethos,
intensified by religious patriarchy
a tradition of male writing about women
religious and nationalist iconography represented
women as passive, emblematic of territory

EAVAN BOLAND

Ireland traditionally portrayed as a woman

(Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Mother Ireland, Dark
Rosaleen)
the representation of the Irish land as a woman stolen,
raped, possessed by the alien invader (the English)

EAVAN BOLAND

poetry as a male preserve

started writing in the early 1960s

women authors appearing together with a broader
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.

EAVAN BOLAND
The best thing about your work is that you

would never know it was by a woman.

genderless poems
attempts to write like a man
compelled to write under the enormous

influence of W. B. Yeats

EAVAN BOLAND

a need to write about womens experience

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.

EAVAN BOLAND
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 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

A volume, In Her Own Image (1980)

body poems
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
Flesh is heretic
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
...
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
from Anorexic

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