WW: In your book A Poet’s Dublin [2014] you state in the interview section, “When I came back [to Ireland] at fourteen I was just a foggy, displaced teenager with little understanding of my surroundings and even less consciousness of its inequities.” When did you become aware, and were there any particular incidents in your life that woke you to what was occurring and what had occurred? One of many reasons for my interest in this book is the wonderful opening line in “Shame”: “So many names for misery.” As well I recall lines from “Lesson 1” and “Lesson 4”—respectively, “My grandmother lived outside history” and “I have come to accept that the story of Irish history is not her story.” What was the process for you and the journey you took en route to these revelatory ideas about your grandmother’s life? Her father was often away at sea. Her family were seafaring. Anna Liffey looks to the east, to the sea, ... from the Liffey.

They self-selected tradition in a way I found intriguing: with a flexible sense of the past and the poem I don’t think I saw in Ireland. The young women I’ve taught are especially drawn to Eavan Boland, who for years has steadily fashioned a career as one of the best Irish poets, but even more so as one of the best poets writing in English. My father was a diplomat in the Irish embassy. When I was a student only 10 percent of Irish people went to the University, and only a small fraction of those were women. These Irish lives were unseen in cultural ways back then. We reserve the right to remove any content at any time from this Community, including without limitation if it violates the, For the best site experience please enable JavaScript in your browser settings, Roddy Doyle: ‘My unpublished first novel was sh*te’, This compelling environmental horror story should stop us in our tracks, Three-Fifths: America’s fractured society past and present, Netflix: The best 50 films to watch right now, Free resource aims to help businesses tackle employee stress and wellbeing, Workplace solutions that help us work together, Business owners hopeful of new guidelines for levels of personal injury damages, Workplace solutions for enterprise organisations in a changed world, A Light That Never Goes Out by Keelin Shanley: a down-to-earth account of a life well lived, Earthlings: Funny, dark and not for the squeamish, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: Life of the model for Degas’s artwork, Roddy Doyle introduces head-turning young Irish writing, The BBC still rues the day Jeremy Clarkson hit an Irishman, Cardi B and Jon Bon Jovi in a tough contest for ill-educated narcissist of the week, Sam McConkey’s Spinal Tap moment takes the restrictions debate to Level 10, Viscera, a new short story by Dearbhaile Houston, The Translator’s Funeral, a new short story by Rónán Hession, Sisters: Daisy Johnson transcends her own dazzling debut, New poem: The Good Going Up to Heaven and the Wicked Going Down to Hell, Putting Irish women writers back in the picture, Celebrating 10 years of young Irish writing, ‘Writing is a good way to process what’s going on in your own life’, Kate Hamer Q&A: ‘Write the story that is burning inside you’, Frequently asked questions about your digital subscription, Specially selected and available only to our subscribers, Exclusive offers, discounts and invitations, Explore the features of your subscription, Carefully curated selections of Irish Times writing, Sign up to get the stories you want delivered to your inbox, An exact digital replica of the printed paper. I disagreed with her, mentioning how there are, and have been, many Irish poets who’ve taught in the U.S. and elsewhere but remained faithful to their Irish identity and heritage: Eamon Grennan, Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Molloy, Paul Muldoon, Paula Meehan, Audrey Molloy, and Angela Patten among the many. Such as ‘summer’ and ‘yellow’ WW: In The Irish Times in 2015, Gerald Smyth wrote a nice review of A Woman Without a Country stating that “Boland brings a spirit of deep inquiry to her experience of womanhood and motherhood, marriage and the domestic space, her Irishness and the historical and psychic inheritance that comes with that state. That wasn’t true in Ireland. I made friends. Nor could you have an American William Yeats. Is welcome, not her. I see this as a continuation of the fili traveling around Ireland spreading and preaching Irish history and lore from village to village and farm to farm, all as a result of England’s hold on the country and the Irish fearing the loss of what could be destroyed, such as books and printed texts. What were your perceptions of money and poverty when you were young and still living in Ireland? We lived at that time in a house near Stephen’s Green.

For good and ill, I’m constructed by that past, from the journey of those events and the struggle of that history. His work has appeared in Rattle, the Kenyon Review, the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Literary Matters, Five Points, the AWP Chronicle, and elsewhere. The poet who emerges from that inevitably has a different identity than the one who begins in a literate culture. WW: This past semester I had five students in my class, all female, and when we discussed poetry and literature by such writers as Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, Caitlín Maude, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, yourself, and even Frank McCourt for Angela’s Ashes, we gravitated almost exclusively toward the lack of economic freedom and opportunities for women, and how a job—or better, a career—is the key factor for women to break the grips of their oppression by men, the church, or outside political forces. But by the mid-century there was an economic effort to improve trade, to open the country to better economic opportunities. They went back to Dublin, married, and had a family. Analysis has never really been a way for me to approach poetry, and when it is applied to my own work I can all too easily lose track of the argument that’s being made. I came to school in New York at the age of eleven and spent three years there, which is where I first heard the names Whitman and Dickinson. Yet, in search of that identity, the poem, like a river, flows through all the important aspects of Boland’s poetry, such as materintiy, poetry and separation. But the idea of home was not something all that present in my mind. If colony is a wound what will heal it? Her 1945 book A Street in Bronzeville with its vesting of history in the local and intimate seems so important, then and now. When I think of Eavan Boland, I am reminded of numerous beautiful poems and individual lines, as in “Shame,” where there are “So many names for misery”; “Anna Liffey,” where “Love will heal / What language fails to know / And needs to say”; and, in her early work “From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin,” this: “I think of what great art removes; / Hazard and death, the future and the past, / This woman’s secret history and her loves—.” In Boland’s work there is an invitation from the poet to enter a secret history of Ireland, including what the world has forced upon that country and its people, and how they have developed unbendable strength over centuries. I teach at Stanford. And, even though “On the one hand, I knew that as a poet I could not easily do without the idea of a nation,” she has expanded her vision into a world that inspires beyond the Irish borders. When I get back to Ireland, I find almost the same conversation going on. I was moved by a newspaper photograph of a fireman lifting the dead baby out of the rubble and holding it almost the way a midwife holds a baby at birth. (Only a few lines are exhibited here.) The civil servant bar remained in force until 1973. I have a copy of the newspaper account of her eviction. They were personal, shaped by feelings of change and disruption. I wanted my life to find its own language, its own forms. #2 was Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” And listed as the best Irish poem was your “Quarantine.” I love this poem and am pleased to see it as #1. The air clearing away to nothing, nothing, nothing.” For me, the last stanza is a defiant rebuttal to the future as well as the past: “We are now / and will always be from now on— / for all I know we have always been— // exiles in our own country.” Do you feel like an exile? Having never met Boland except through her poems, the students admire the personal strength needed to carve out a life, whether in Dublin or at Stanford University, a life that has roots in all the oppression and hardships we explored with other Irish writers, as well as in an Irish history wrought by British oppression. For the past couple of years I’ve been fortunate enough to edit Poetry Ireland Review, the journal of the really exemplary Poetry Ireland organization, which does so much for poets and writers in the country. The book was published in 1924. Despite the fact that Dublin was a literary city with an apparently welcoming demeanor, it was still true that for women Ireland could still be deeply, ruinously conservative.

If so, or if not, why? EB: I didn’t come to the U.S. until I was fifty, when I was hired then by Stanford as a full professor. After such injuries what difference do we feel? When I think of Eavan Boland, I am reminded of numerous beautiful poems and individual lines, as in “Shame,” where there are “So many names for misery”; “Anna Liffey,” where “Love will heal / What language fails to know / And needs to say”; and, in her early work “From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin,” this: “I think of what great art removes; / Hazard and death, the future and the past, / This … So, I feel part of things in both places. This being said, how have things changed during your lifetime for women in Ireland? There are also younger poets, really too many to name. Finds no shelter in language. © EB: I have a sense that women like my grandmother were not included in the story of Irish history. The Review comes out three times a year and gives me a vantage point from which to see the energy and vitality of Irish poetry at the moment.

How is it on this How do you, if you have, reconcile the oppressive forces in Ireland?

They went through it. He was a civil servant. You bestowed, and gives you back I wish I had more.

You have a level of inclusion into the American culture, whether it is artistic, political, or in the general sense of inclusion—an acceptance that you may not have had elsewhere.

Some of those maneuvers still seem to me elegant models for constructing a poem, just as the Irish poem historically can offer exemplary models of rhetoric.

Nothing seems effortless now. Afterwards my skin felt different. To me, those changes seem welcome and necessary, even if overdue. After twenty-four years, I assume it has worked out. EB: Nothing seemed effortless when I was young. WW: My aforementioned colleague is a fourth-generation American who still feels connected to Ireland. EB: I don’t have a single poem.

We particularly looked at the Catholic Church oppressing women, and England oppressing the entire country. The culture had a deep, complicated relation to an oral tradition. Just a child’s sense of being outside. Also, Bradstreet did not leave with male relatives having merely “jobs and means of support.” Her father and husband were the two most powerful men in the Colony, both governors of it. Differences of color, of ethnicity, of gender, and of class are more easily assimilated than they once were. What was it like for you during that time in Ireland, during the Troubles? WW: Do you read reviews or critical analyses of your work? It was the only way language and memory could make it out of those dark centuries.

And there wasn’t one. EB: It’s complicated. It was the women a generation before me and in the one before them who were affected. The next target of our examination is “Anna Liffey”, which is mainly concerned with defining identity and voicing it. I was twenty-eight when it was repealed. It was not prosperous. She pioneered”—and here is where I think he is spot on—“a poetic language for those living unseen lives in the new territories of Dublin suburbia.” Do you feel you speak for the people with lives that go unseen? Single words she once loved The Liffey hides the long ships, the muskets and the burning domes. Is that an accurate sense of that particular situation? He wanted to evoke the crisis of that tradition, when Irish poets were losing their language and their future was slipping away. The words are not meant to be a puzzle. And it was terrible to think of Irish women working in education, in commerce, in the financial sector, contributing their best efforts to a new society, and then that effort being discarded when they married. . This a human process, not so much a political one. But for that moment there were things I no longer recognized. To comment you must now be an Irish Times subscriber. Her life was hard. / Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.” There are no overt references to the Troubles and Britain, but this poem is a direct result of what occurred in those cities, of the bombings. EB: There’s a large number, so maybe names aren’t the only useful things here. And never would. Apart from its practical effect, it was a symbolic show of disrespect for what women had achieved in the state. What about the young women you teach at Stanford and how you must influence them? WW: What do you see as being the greatest obstacle in Ireland at this time, and can you propose any solutions? Although Joyce's deconstructive tendencies provide an added challenge for any author looking to engage with Finnegans Wake, Boland manages to reclaim ALP, both channelling and challenging Joyce's portrayal of the Liffey as “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” The account details entered are not currently associated with an Irish Times subscription.