many years as a literary journalist. Her first
collection of poems,New Territory, appeared in
- Since then she has produced six books,
three of which (including the latest) were Poetry
Book Society Choices.
Outside Historyis a retrospective of Boland’s
most mature and best work. It contains a generous
selection of poems from her last two volumes,
Night FeedandThe Journey, and a large body of
new work as well. (By reversing the order, how-
ever, putting the newest poems at the front of the
book and the oldest at the back, it makes it hard
for the reader to follow the deepening patterns of
meaning, resonance and reference over time.)
Tucked away at the back of this book is a group
of nine poems fromNight Feed(now out of print),
revised and rearranged into a sequence entitled
‘‘Domestic Interior.’’ These are risky, short-lined
poems, with a fresh, uncluttered, clean-edged
presentation. Boland’s acute observations of sur-
faces and textures in the ordinary world gives
them their energy:
This is my time:
the twilight closing in,
a hissing on the ring,
stove noises, kettle steam
and children’s kisses....
the buttery curls,
the light,
the bran fur of the teddy bear.
The fist like a nighttime daisy:
damp and tight.
(‘‘Energies’’)
Her descriptions of ordinary objects can res-
onate suddenly with a shimmer of enchantment.
In a poem exploring the monotony of caring for
a small family, for instance, we find this image of
a doorstep milk bottle:
Cold air
clouds the rinsed,
milky glass,
blowing clear
with a hint
of winter constellations....
(‘‘Monotonies’’)
The precedents for these poems are not in
verse but in painting. Boland turned to the still
lives and domestic interiors of Jean-Baptiste
Chardin and Jan van Eyck for technical exam-
ple. By conferring distinction upon the homely,
Chardin and van Eyck revealed their objects as
much as they described them, and Boland’s tech-
nique of imbuing ordinary things with such fresh
significance that they become a universe in them-
selves is learned from these painters. In the title
poem of the sequence, a poem which takes van
Eyck’sThe Arnolfini Marriage as its starting
point, she explains:
But there’s way of life
that is its own witness:
put the kettle on, shut the blind.
Home is a sleeping child,
an open mind
and our effects,
shrugged and settled
in the sort of light
jugs and kettles
grow important by.
By taking as her subject the routine day that
most women in Ireland live (caring for children,
washing, cooking and sewing), Boland renews
the dignity of demeaned labor and establishes a
precedent for its inclusion in Irish poetry. By
summoning up a tradition of artists like Chardin
and Van Eyck, she authenticates her own poetic
stance. But by emphasizing her identification
with the female subjects, rather than the male
painters, she also subverts their tradition.
Her technique both in these poems and those
ofThe Journeyowes much to her fine under-
standing of light, tone, color and composition
(Boland’s mother, an early influence, is painter
Frances Kelly). In ‘‘Self-Portrait on a Summer
Evening’’ fromThe Journey,Bolandexaminesa
painting by Chardin:
All summer long
he has been slighting her
in botched blues, tints,
half-tones, rinsed neutrals.
What you are watching
is light unlearning itself,
an infinite unfrocking of the prism.
Before your eyes
the ordinary life
is being glazed over:
pigments of the bibelot,
the cabochon, the water-opal
pearl to the intimate
simple colors of
her ankle-length summer skirt.
It is this talent—the skillful setting off of
one light effect by another, the interplay of
the smallest touches of color with touches of
rhyme (‘‘tints’’ with ‘‘rinsed,’’ ‘‘blues’’ with ‘‘neu-
trals’’), repeated as though at random, always
discreet but always there—that gives us theOutside History