sense of a delicate under-structure throughout
Boland’s work. At the end of this poem, the
woman in the painting becomes the poet herself.
As she crosses the yard, keeping one eye on the
garden and the other on her children, she
announces: ‘‘I am Chardin’s woman/ edged in
reflected light, / hardened by / the need to be
ordinary.’’ It is this fidelity to ordinary human
experience in the astute consciousness of the poet
that makes these poems unpretentious, under-
stated and exhilarating.
In the poems fromThe Journey, the ordinary
experience of the present is layered with a rich
sense of the past. The theme of storytelling as
both the archive of female history and the mem-
ory of a nation is explored in ‘‘The Oral Tradi-
tion.’’ The poet lingers in gentle reflection at the
end of ‘‘a reading / or a workshop or whatever’’:
only half-wondering
what becomes of words,
the brisk herbs of language,
the fragrances we think we sing,
if anything.
The leisurely pace of the slant rhyme (‘‘words’’
with ‘‘herbs,’’ ‘‘languages’’ with ‘‘fragrances’’) shifts
into internal rhyme (‘‘Wood hissed and split / in
the open grate, / broke apart in sparks’’), quicken-
ing the impact as the climax approaches. The poet
overhears a story shared between two women, and
is caught up in the drama as the great grand-
mother of the teller gives birth in an open field.
The diction modulates from colloquial to poetic
andthemusicrisesasthepoetimaginesthe
moment when
... she lay down
in vetch and linen
and lifted up her son
to the archive
they would shelter in:
the oral song
avid as superstition,
layered like an amber in
the wreck of language
and the remnants of a nation.
It is this discovery of the past through recog-
nizing the difficulty of turning it into the present
that undergirds thetour de forceof this book, the
ambitious title sequence, ‘‘Outside History.’’ The
history of the title is at once Eavan Boland’s
personal history and the history of her nation.
When she uses one as a metaphor for the other,
as she does in ‘‘The Achill Woman’’ and ‘‘What
We Lost,’’ she writes with an unforgettable
mixture of courage and perception. In ‘‘What
We Lost,’’ using a voice that has deepened in
resonance and authority, Boland tells the story
of a child (her mother) who is told a story which,
‘‘unheard’’ and ‘‘unshared,’’ is forgotten:
Believe it, what we lost is here in this room
on this veiled evening....
The fields are dark already.
The frail connections have been made and
are broken.
The dumb-show of legend has become
language,
is becoming silence and who will know that
once
words were possibilities and disappoint-
ments,...
The formal structure of the sequence is as
fully accomplished as its themes. It has an ingen-
ious clock-like configuration: twelve poems
cycle through timescapes of changing light and
changing seasons, suggesting both the twelve
positions on a clock-face and the twelve months
of the calendar. In a private interview, Boland
described the sequence as a study in the break-
down of control: ‘‘It deals deliberately with the
artificial construct of time and the seasons, and
the ways in which these artifices of control ulti-
mately breakdown.’’ Myth for Boland is another
form of control (earlier in the sequence she
defines it as ‘‘the wound we leave in the time we
have’’). ‘‘The attachment of somebody like
myself to myth,’’ she explained, ‘‘is very much
the flirtation and engagement with the idea of
control, the way that we restrict meaning by
controlling it. We restrict meaning and finally
we restrict reality. We tamper with our own
mortal nature, and therefore with love and there-
fore with time.’’
In the final poem of the sequence, which
Boland describes as ‘‘an intense formalization
of the breakdown of time,’’ she rejects the con-
trolling impulse of myth. The muscular cadences
of the poem pull us along in their undertow:
Out of myth into history I move to be
part of that ordeal
whose darkness is
only now reaching me from those fields,
those rivers, those roads clotted as
firmaments with the dead.
How slowly they die
as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.
And we are too late. We are always too late.
(‘‘Outside History’’)Outside History