Mar

17

Book ‘Em: Origins And Traditions.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 17, 2008 |

The career of poet Eavan Boland has spanned more than forty years, and, although she’s produced more recent books, including the excellent Domestic Violence, her volume An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 stands out not only as her first volume of collected poems but also for tracking her progress as a poet, from her early, very formal work to her more mature, more free, and, ultimately, stronger work of later years. Her work is lyrical and ranges across any subject that comes to hand. Like the Irish poets she follows, Boland translates experience through the lens of her own mind, making concrete things out of words and words out of concrete things. Paintings and gorgeous images are prominent in her poetry; like all great poets she has a good ear and also a love of language. Unlike fellow Irish poet Seamus Heaney, though, whose first book opens with “Digging”, a quiet, almost apologetic poem about his decision to become a poet, Boland begins her career with a poem written when she was nineteen, “Athene’s Song”, which starts with a bang,

From my father’s head I sprung

Goddess of the war…

but ends more quietly, apparently realizing she has some growing to do:

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.

It was a confident staking out of poetic ground for a poet who, following in the grand tradition of Irish poetry, had her work cut out for her, but also seems to have known she had the ability. Or did she? Her 1980 volume In Her Own Image would contain the playful, and deceptively light, poem “Making Up”, and these lines:

I look

in the glass.

My face is made,

it says:

Take nothing, nothing,

at its face value.

Check out Boland’s page at Norton Poets Online where you can hear her read her poem “That The Science Of Cartography Is Limited”.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Calling All Sonnetteers. :: Just Write on March 27, 2008 9:47 am

    [...] Here’s a sonnet by Eavan Boland: [...]

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