Work in progress: The work began in and much can be attributed to Dr. Joe Pellegrino’s 19th and 20th Century British Literature Fall ’22 class at Georgia Southern University.
1944 Eavan Aisling Boland born on September 24, in Dublin, Ireland. Her father is a distinguished Irish diplomat who served as Irish ambassador to Great Britain (1950-1956) and to the United States (1956-1964). Her mother is a painter who had studied in Paris in the 1930s. Because of her father’s diplomatic career, EB is educated in Dublin, London, and New York.
1950 Family moves to London, where EB experiences anti-Irish prejudice for the first time.
1962 Attends Trinity College, Dublin. Publishes her first chapbook.
1967 Teaches at Trinity.
1968 Receives the Macauley Fellowship for poetry.
1969 Marries the novelist Kevin Casey; has two daughters.
- After her marriage, EB leaves academe and moves out of Dublin and into the suburbs to become “wife, mother, and housewife.”
1980 EB publishes a controversial work, In Her Own Image, that brings her into debates over feminism and the role of female poets in Ireland. Consequently, EB has been a stable and influential voice for equality for women poets in the male-dominated literary world of Ireland.
- Co-founds Arlen House, an Irish feminist press.
1990s EB teaches at several universities in the United States.
1995 Professorship at Stanford U, chair of Creative Writing.
2001 Against Love Poetry is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
2007 Domestic Violence is shortlisted for the Forward prize in the UK.
- Her poem, “Violence Against Women,” from the same volume is awarded the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry for the best poem published in 2007 in Shenandoah magazine.
2015 Her poem “Quarantine” is one of 10 poems shortlisted for RTÉ’s selection of Ireland’s favorite poems of the last 100 years .
2018 EB is elected to the Royal Irish Academy, an independent academic body that promotes study and excellence in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is one of Ireland’s premier learned societies and cultural institutions.
- She is commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy to write the poem “Our future will become the past of other women” to be read at the UN and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of female suffrage in Ireland.
2020 27 April: EB dies in Dublin from a stroke.
Occasionally I see myself, or the ghost of myself, in the places where I first became a poet. On the pavement just around Stephen’s Green for instance, with its wet trees and sharp railings. What I see is not an actual figure, but a sort of remembered loneliness. The poets I knew were not women: the women I knew were not poets. The conversations I had, or wanted to have, were never complete.
Anorexic (1978)
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
heretic – body against body
Satan the original wiles
self denials is not hyphenated not just not eating but also denying herself
renounce – deny, give up
“she” the body has learned her lesson
warm drum – heartbeat
rib – Adam and Eve
get back to the garden, back to the paradise
go back to when she was still in Adam
forked tongue
pythons kill by crushing ribs, lungs, hearts
The Pomegranate
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.
Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own
The linen map
hung from the wall.
The linen was shiny
and cracked in places.
The cracks were darkened by grime.
It was fastened to the classroom wall with
a wooden batten on
a triangle of knotted cotton.
The colours
were faded out
so the red of Empire–
the stain of absolute possession–
the mark once made from Kashmir
to the oast-barns of the Kent
coast south of us was
underwater coral.
Ireland was far away.
And farther away
every year.
I was nearly an English child.
I could list the English kings.
I could place the famous battles.
I was learning to recognize
God’s grace in history.
And the waters
of the Irish Sea,
their shallow weave
and cross-grained blue-green,
had drained away
to the pale gaze
of a doll’s china eyes:
a stare without recognition or memory.
We have no oracles,
no rocks or olive trees,
no sacred path to the temple
and no priestesses–
the teacher’s voice had a London accent.
This was London.
This was England. 1952.
It was Ancient History class.
She put the tip
of the wooden
pointer on the map.
She tapped over ridges and dried-
out rivers and cities buried in
the sea and sea-scapes which
had once been land.
And came to a stop.
The Roman Empire
was the greatest
Empire ever known.
(Until our time of course.)
Remember this, children.
In those days,
the Delphic Oracle was reckoned
to be the exact centre of the earth.
Suddenly
I wanted
to stand in front of it.
I wanted to trace over
and over the weave of
my own country and read out
names I was next to forgetting.
Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.
To ask
where exactly
was my old house?
Its brass One and Seven.
Its flight of granite steps.
Its lilac tree whose scent
stayed under your fingernails
for days?
For days,
she was saying, even months,
the ancients travelled to the Oracle.
They brought sheep and killed them.
They brought questions
about tillage and war.
They rarely left with more
than an ambiguous answer.
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