as does Bolandís representation of Anna Liffey, that authentic notions
of the ërealí are part of the misrepresentations of History. There is no
authentic outside place of transcendence where true time or identity is
magically found. In order to be more present to herself she must
notice her absence or the way in which her voice becomes committed
to silence. The ëagencyí of the poems is found in how they call for
readers to listen to the silences amid the noise of myth. Asking why
ëIrishí and ëfemaleí identity are conceived in terms of loss, the poems
call attention to the discompositions of composition, forcing readers to
critique the misrepresentations of representation.
In ëEscapeí from The Lost Land the speaker narrates the story of
a mother bird found too close to the road by a middle aged woman:
ëBoth of them escaped from the telling.í Escape from the terrors of
history is found less in transcendence or truth but in misrepresentation
as we slip from the telling. Bhabha notices: ëthe subject is graspable
only in the passage between telling/told, between ìhereî and
ìsomewhere elseî, and in this double scene the very condition of
cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject.í^58 It is not
surprising that in The Lost Land Boland calls not for female
transcendence but for attention to ëThe Necessity for Ironyí or
ëdouble-timeí:^59
When I was young
I studied styles: their use
and origin. Which age
was known for which
ornament: and was always drawn
to lyric speech, a civil tone.
But I never thought
I would have the need,
as I do now, for a darker one:
Spirit of irony,^60Seeking historical beauty over tables at ëantiques marketsí she rarely
turned to see her daughter who has grown up and left, and so a ësmall
historyí has been lost while the poet of ëOutside Historyí tried to
58 Bhabha, p.150.
59 Ibid., p.144.
60 Boland, ëThe Necessity for Ironyí, The Lost Land, pp.54ñ5.