The power and sweep of the sequence is a
function of the silences into which it taps. The
silences of women in these poems are all the more
poignant because they are widened to include so
many people, male and female, past and present:
the conquered Gaels, the casualties of the potato
famines, the immigrant Irish, and the victims of
recent sectarian killings in the North.
It is common for new landmarks in Irish
literature to go unrecognized by its custodians.
Yet when the dust kicked up by the current
canon debate has settled, I expect we will see
Outside History firmly ensconced. By then
Eavan Boland’s work will have made and found
a context at the heart of her national literature,
and in doing so, forced a more generous shape
upon it.
Source:Jody Allen-Randolph, ‘‘A Passion for the Ordi-
nary,’’ inWomen’s Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 7, April
1992, pp. 19–20.
Eavan Boland
In the following excerpt from an interview with
Wright and Hannan, Boland discusses the pres-
sures that women poets, particularly Irish women
poets, face in the literary world.
[Means Wright and Hannan:] A first-rate
Irish woman poet would appear to receive less
recognition in Ireland than even a third-rate male
poet. Do you find this to be true?
[Boland:] I was on a panel in Boston recently
at a festival of Irish poetry, and exactly that point
was with me. In the audience there were a number
of male poets, but I knew of five or six wonderful
Irish women poets that nobody in that audience
would have heard of. And the breaking-through
point for them is more at risk, I think, than for
the male poet. My problem is, and certainly my
ethical worry is that the woman poet doesn’t even
get considered: she’s under so much pressure in
this particular country.
Can you describe these pressures?
We like to think that in a country like Ire-
land that is historically pressured and has been
defeated and has had minorities within it, that
people get the permission equally to be poets.
We like to think that, but they don’t. There is not
an equal societal commission here for people to
explore their individuality in an expressive
way—for a woman to cross the distance in writ-
ing poetry to becoming a poet. ‘‘If I called myself
a poet,’’ a young woman in one of my workshops
told me, ‘‘people would think I didn’t wash my
windows.’’ This was a piercingly acute remark
on the fracture between the perception of wom-
anhood in a small town in the southeast of Ire-
land and the perception of the poet. So the
second part of the equation of not getting an
equal societal permission is that I couldn’t say
that the people who have had permission—in
other words, the bardic poets, who are male—
that they have in every case generously held out
their hand to these women, that they have equally
encouraged them, given them a hearing. The pro-
posals that happen under the surface to make a
canon—that are subterranean and invisible—
have been radically exclusive. The male writers
in Ireland traditionally, in both prose and poetry,
do have a kind of bardic stance; they do see
themselves as inheriting a kind of bardic role.
They have been disdainful of women writers
with women’s themes; they use a language I
don’t think you’d see in Canada or the United
States. Only recently, for example, someone well
involved with literary things in Ireland got up in a
conference on ‘‘Women and Writing’’ to complain
of the ‘‘pornography of childbirth and of men-
struation in Irish women’s writing.’’
This kind of discrimination has certainly
existed in the United States.
Yes, but you have the huge diversity, that
wonderful diversity of pressure and voices and
liberalism. Ireland is a very small country, and
its literary community is, over the past forty
years, very staid in its perceptions. There isn’t a
lot of oxygen for the young woman poet—who is
tremendously vulnerable to how she’s perceived.
Rita Ann Higgins, for example, the young
working class poet in Galway, or Moya Cannan
or Eva Bourke, who can’t find their books in the
Dublin bookstores?I THINK IT’S IMPORTANT THAT WOMENWRITERS DON’T HAVE TO BE FEMINISTS, DON’T HAVE
TO BE ANYTHING. THEY JUST HAVE TO HAVE
ENOUGH OXYGEN TO WRITE. I DON’T CARE WHAT
THEIR POLITICAL PERSUASIONS ARE.’’Outside History