'The Historians' by Eavan Boland

 
 

I knew then what I wanted 

to write was not storms

or wet air, it was something

else: it was metaphor and yet

what was made for language 

when language cannot carry

meaning there. Instead

I learned in the hushed garden

before the wind rose what

I needed to know. Silence told the story.

(from ‘The Just Use of Figures’)


Last April I wrote - and spoke - about Eavan Boland just after her shocking death. She was 75, but her end was still shocking, since totally unexpected, and also because, as with the death of Seamus Heaney, it felt as if here in Ireland we had lost one of the adults in the room. And it was during the early stages of the pandemic, too, when the world itself seemed stunned.

Before she died she had been preparing what turned out to be a posthumous collection, The Historians. She left us very much at the top of her game. The Costa Poetry Award last year was no sentimental gesture, but instead a proper acknowledgement of a book full of wisdom and confidence, and eloquence: it is not hyperbole to suggest that she could have been awarded the Nobel Prize at some point. Her deep engagement with Irish history, and particularly women’s place in it, would have fitted the Nobel’s preferences well.

Though we read this collection through the sad filter of her death, I was cheered by it. There is the sheer quality of her writing: you can’t help hearing her own voice when you read the poems - that spareness with phrases, the characteristic falling cadences, the beautiful appropriateness of the imagery, her tender use of ordinary objects. She ranges as widely as ever, with the personal and public interfused (at the end of the book ‘Our future will become the past of other women’, on the centenary of Irish women’s suffrage, is a rare example of a commissioned poem: a fine poem, but not Boland’s normal style). 

I was especially cheered because in the context of the crude public discourse of the contemporary world, its anger, inaccuracy and polarisation, here is a calm statement of wisdom and of how language can truly address who we are and were, of the barometric fate / of our dailyness (‘The Barograph’). Typically, she shies away from her own importance, suggesting that she is on the outside, walking past lighted windows, / drawn curtains. She is a transient, a woman / dressed for warmth, / telling the island to myself, as I always have, / so as to see it more clearly and hoped to stand if only for one moment / on its margin (‘Margin’).

She may have written about the marginal at times but she herself became central. In the superb ‘The Lamplighter’, the fifth in the opening title sequence, she takes us back into the old lithographs / and situational drawings / in which dusk appears and draws our attention to the lamplighter’s nightly care / and his bright line and thinks How often I long to lift / my words high. How / often nothing is raised / and nothing brightens:

I read once

that when he heard

loud whispers and laughter

in alleys and hidden doorways

followed by

the silence of illicit kisses

he would not stop

he would pass on

to other streets

where light was needed.

Leaving behind him

the gift of shadows.

We are on the streets where light was needed, and thankfully she did indeed leave it to us.