New Selected Poems Read online

  EAVAN BOLAND

  New Selected Poems

  For Kevin, Sarah, Eavan and Éamonn

  Acknowledgements

  23 Poems was first published in 1962 by Gallagher Press, Dublin; New Territory in 1967 by Allen Figgis, Dublin; The War Horse in 1975 by Gollancz, London; In Her Own Image in 1980 by Arlen House, Dublin.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  from New Territory 1967

  Athene’s Song

  New Territory

  From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin

  Yeats in Civil War

  Belfast vs Dublin

  from The War Horse 1975

  The War Horse

  The Famine Road

  Child of Our Time

  Suburban Woman

  The Laws of Love

  O Fons Bandusiae

  Cyclist with Cut Branches

  Song

  from In Her Own Image 1980

  Anorexic

  In Her Own Image

  Making Up

  Tirade for the Mimic Muse

  from Night Feed 1982

  Night Feed

  Domestic Interior

  Energies

  Monotony

  Endings

  After a Childhood Away from Ireland

  The Muse Mother

  Woman in Kitchen

  Patchwork or the Poet’s Craft

  Degas’s Laundresses

  It’s a Woman’s World

  The New Pastoral

  ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’

  The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish

  from The Journey 1987

  I

  Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

  Mise Eire

  The Oral Tradition

  Fever

  Lace

  I Remember

  The Bottle Garden

  Suburban Woman: A Detail

  The Briar Rose

  The Women

  Nocturne

  II

  The Journey

  Envoi

  III

  Listen. This is the Noise of Myth

  An Irish Childhood in England: 1951

  Fond Memory

  The Emigrant Irish

  The Glass King

  from Outside History 1990

  I Object Lessons

  The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

  The Rooms of Other Women Poets

  The Shadow Doll

  The Latin Lesson

  Bright-Cut Irish Silver

  II Outside History: A sequence

  I The Achill Woman

  II A False Spring

  III The Making of an Irish Goddess

  IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland

  V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God

  VI The Photograph on My Father’s Desk

  VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History.

  VIII An Old Steel Engraving

  IX In Exile

  X We Are Always Too Late

  XI What We Lost

  XII Outside History

  III Distances

  Distances

  Midnight Flowers

  Our Origins Are in the Sea

  What Love Intended

  from In a Time of Violence 1994

  The Singers

  I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence

  1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited

  2 The Death of Reason

  3 March 1 1847. By the First Post

  4 In a Bad Light

  5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin

  6 Inscriptions

  7 Beautiful Speech

  II Legends

  This Moment

  Love

  The Pomegranate

  Moths

  In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own

  The Parcel

  Lava Cameo

  Legends

  III Anna Liffey

  Anna Liffey

  Time and Violence

  A Woman Painted on a Leaf

  from The Lost Land 1998

  I Colony: A Sequence

  1 My Country in Darkness

  2 The Harbour

  3 Witness

  4 Daughters of Colony

  5 Imago

  6 The Scar

  7 City of Shadows

  8 Unheroic

  9 The Colonists

  10 A Dream of Colony

  11 A Habitable Grief

  12 The Mother Tongue

  II The Lost Land

  The Lost Land

  Mother Ireland

  The Blossom

  Tree of Life

  The Necessity for Irony

  Heroic

  Whose?

  from Code 2001

  I Marriage

  I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission

  II Against Love Poetry

  III The Pinhole Camera

  IV Quarantine

  V Embers

  VI Then

  VII First Year

  VIII Once

  IX Thankëd be Fortune

  X A Marriage for the Millennium

  XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary

  II Code

  Code

  Limits

  Limits 2

  How We Made a New Art on Old Ground

  Making Money

  Exile! Exile!

  Is It Still the Same

  Irish Poetry

  from Domestic Violence 2007

  Domestic Violence

  1 Domestic Violence

  2 How the Dance Came to the City

  3 How It Was Once In Our Country

  4 Still Life

  5 Silenced

  6 Histories

  7 Wisdom

  8 Irish Interior

  9 In Our Own Country

  Letters to the Dead

  An Elegy for my Mother In Which She Scarcely Appears

  Amber

  And Soul

  On This Earth

  Letters to the Dead

  To Memory

  Becoming the Hand of John Speed

  Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet

  Becoming the Hand of John Speed

  Violence Against Women

  Instructions

  In Coming Days

  New Poems

  Art of Empire

  The Long Evenings of their Leavetakings

  Re-reading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in a Changed Ireland

  As

  Becoming Anne Bradstreet

  Cityscape

  A Woman Without a Country

  Index of First Lines

  Index of Titles

  About the Author

  Also by Eavan Boland from Carcanet Press

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  This New Selected is unusual in one respect: it follows a Collected Poems, rather than preceding it. I have included poems from all of my previous volumes, beginning with New Territory, taking a broader sampling from some than from others. I have also included some new, as yet unpublished poems. In a small number of poems I have made minor adjustments to punctuation and layout compared with the previous versions.

  Eavan Boland

  Stanford/Dublin 2013

  from NEW TERRITORY

  1967

  Athene’s Song

  for my father

  From my father’s head I sprung

  Goddess of the war, created

  Partisan and soldiers’ physic –

  My symbols boast and brazen gong –

  Until I made
in Athens wood

  Upon my knees a new music.

  When I played my pipe of bone,

  Robbed and whittled from a stag,

  Every bird became a lover

  Every lover to its tone

  Found the truth of song and brag;

  Fish sprung in the full river.

  Peace became the toy of power

  When other noises broke my sleep.

  Like dreams I saw the hot ranks

  And heroes in another flower

  Than any there; I dropped my pipe

  Remembering their shouts, their thanks.

  Beside the water, lost and mute,

  Lies my pipe and like my mind

  Remains unknown, remains unknown

  And in some hollow taking part

  With my heart against my hand

  Holds its peace and holds its own.

  New Territory

  Several things announced the fact to us:

  The captain’s Spanish tears

  Falling like doubloons in the headstrong light,

  And then of course the fuss –

  The crew jostling and interspersing cheers

  With wagers. Overnight,

  As we went down to our cabins, nursing the last

  Of the grog, talking as usual of conquest,

  Land hove into sight.

  Frail compasses and trenchant constellations

  Brought us as far as this,

  And now air and water, fire and earth

  Stand at their given stations

  Out there, and are ready to replace

  This single desperate width

  Of ocean. Why do we hesitate? Water and air

  And fire and earth and therefore life are here.

  And therefore death.

  Out of the dark man comes to life and into it

  He goes and loves and dies,

  (His element being the dark and not the light of day)

  So the ambitious wit

  Of poets and exploring ships have been his eyes –

  Riding the dark for joy –

  And so Isaiah of the sacred text is eagle-eyed because

  By peering down the unlit centuries

  He glimpsed the holy boy.

  From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin

  Dressed in the colours of a country day –

  Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies –

  Chardin’s peasant woman

  Is to be found at all times in her short delay

  Of dreams, her eyes mixed

  Between love and market, empty flagons of wine

  At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed

  Her limbs in colour, and her heart in line.

  In her right hand, the hindlegs of a hare

  Peep from a cloth sack; through the door

  Another woman moves

  In painted daylight; nothing in this bare

  Closet has been lost

  Or changed. I think of what great art removes:

  Hazard and death, the future and the past,

  This woman’s secret history and her loves –

  And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining

  She has just come back, where men and women

  Congregate and go

  Among the produce, learning to live from morning

  To next day, linked

  By a common impulse to survive, although

  In surging light they are single and distinct,

  Like birds in the accumulating snow.

  Yeats in Civil War

  Presently a strange thing happened:

  I began to smell honey in places

  where honey could not be.

  In middle age you exchanged the sandals

  Of a pilgrim for a Norman keep

  In Galway. Civil war started, vandals

  Sacked your country, made off with your sleep;

  Somehow you arranged your escape

  Aboard a spirit-ship which every day

  Hoisted sail out of fire and rape.

  On that ship your mind was stowaway.

  The sun mounted on a wasted place,

  But the wind at every door and turn

  Blew the smell of honey in your face

  Where there was none. Whatever we may learn

  You are its sum, struggling to survive –

  A fantasy of honey your reprieve.

  Belfast vs Dublin

  for Derek Mahon

  Into this city of largesse

  You carried clever discontent,

  And now, the budget of your time here spent,

  Let us not mince the word: this is no less

  Than halfway towards the end. Gathering

  In a rag tied to a stick, all in confusion,

  Dublin reverence and Belfast irony –

  Now hoist with your conclusion.

  Cut by the throats before we spoke

  One to another, yet we breast

  The dour line of North and South, pressed

  Into action by the clock. Here we renounce

  All dividend except the brilliant quarrel

  Of our towns: mine sports immoral

  Courtiers in unholy waste, but your unwitty

  Secret love for it is Belfast city.

  We have had time to talk, and strongly

  Disagree about the living out

  Of life. There was no need to shout.

  Rightly or else quite wrongly

  We have run out of time, if not of talk.

  Let us then cavalierly fork

  Our ways, since we, and all unknown,

  Have called into question one another’s own.

  from THE WAR HORSE

  1975

  The War Horse

  This dry night, nothing unusual

  About the clip, clop, casual

  Iron of his shoes as he stamps death

  Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.

  I lift the window, watch the ambling feather

  Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether

  In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,

  Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head

  Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.

  Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn –

  Of distant interest like a maimed limb,

  Only a rose which now will never climb

  The stone of our house, expendable, a mere

  Line of defence against him, a volunteer

  You might say, only a crocus its bulbous head

  Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.

  But we, we are safe, our unformed fear

  Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

  If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted

  Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

  He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge,

  Threatening; neighbours use the subterfuge

  Of curtains; he stumbles down our short street

  Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,

  Then to breathe relief lean on the sill

  And for a second only my blood is still

  With atavism. That rose he smashed frays

  Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days

  Of burned countryside, illicit braid:

  A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.

  The Famine Road

  ‘Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones,

  these Irish, give them no coins at all; their bones

  need toil, their characters no less.’ Trevelyan’s

  seal blooded the deal table. The Relief

  Committee deliberated: ‘Might it be safe,

  Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force

  from nowhere, going nowhere of course?’

  ‘one out of every ten and then

  another third of those again

  women – in a case like yours.’

  Sick, directionless they worked; fork,
stick

  were iron years away; after all could

  they not blood their knuckles on rock, suck

  April hailstones for water and for food?

  Why for that, cunning as housewives, each eyed –

  as if at a corner butcher – the other’s buttock.

  ‘anything may have caused it, spores,

  a childhood accident; one sees

  day after day these mysteries.’

  Dusk: they will work tomorrow without him.

  They know it and walk clear; he has become

  a typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although

  he shares it with some there. No more than snow

  attends its own flakes where they settle

  and melt, will they pray by his death rattle.

  ‘You never will, never you know

  but take it well woman, grow

  your garden, keep house, good-bye.’

  ‘It has gone better than we expected, Lord

  Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured

  in one; from parish to parish, field to field,

  the wretches work till they are quite worn,

  then fester by their work; we march the corn

  to the ships in peace; this Tuesday I saw bones

  out of my carriage window, your servant Jones.’

  ‘Barren, never to know the load

  of his child in you, what is your body

  now if not a famine road?’

  Child of Our Time

  for Aengus

  Yesterday I knew no lullaby

  But you have taught me overnight to order

  This song, which takes from your final cry

  Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason,

  Its rhythm from the discord of your murder

  Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.

  We who should have known how to instruct