Where the Poet Stood: Eavan Boland and the Power of Perspective

The only book I have signed by Eavan Boland is The Lost Land, from the first reading of hers I attended, when she came to Florida just after I finished my MFA in 1998. It’s signed not to me, but to my mother, to whom I sent it, or gave it when I went home to Arkansas. I probably said, “I thought you’d like these. She’s writing about women and place, too.” Or, “She’s writing about losing a sense of home,” which my mother had experienced after World War II, and her Irish great-grandmother before her. I did learn to write about place and loss from Boland’s poems in the years after I first heard and loved her work, and, more deeply, in the two years I got to spend in her brilliant, incisive Stegner workshops. On the first day, I remember her asking how much we wanted “the heat turned up,” and us thinking she meant a thermostat, until we realized, or she told us, slightly impatient but maybe drily amused, as she’d be, she meant the heat of the critiques we would offer one another. But what I learned most of all—so foundationally, I didn’t even know I was learning it until years later—was about inhabiting perspective: knowing I was in a room with other people and a certain heat of their opinions, and their voices, and my body and my words, and maybe a bookshelf to my left, and a door that opened to a hallway, and all the doors inside us that opened to personal and collective pasts and other places. Knowing, in these same ways, to locate the speaker of my poem. I mean perspective in the visual-art sense of shared space in which objects reside, of lines that rely on a vanishing point; perspective that, if we’re paying attention, makes us aware of where we’re situated and where we are looking and why.

In “Subject Matters,” from her seminal 1996 collection of essays, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, Boland says of the overtly political (and male) Irish poem she inherited, “the planes and angles of the poem became flattened out. Where they should have jutted against a horizon, defining it by a sharp and challenging shape, they made a continuum with it. Or in other words, they fitted smoothly into the context of public opinion and assumption.” While she says much more here and elsewhere about the challenges for a woman poet to stake her own place in relation to the “context of public opinion,” what interests me most returning to this passage are the “planes and angles of the poem” that should have “jutted against a horizon.” A painter’s daughter who often wrote about art in her own poems, Boland words her critique in terms of perspective: she notes a failure to differentiate between foreground and background, to make contrasts visible, and make us, as readers, aware of viewpoint. How can we begin to unmake the fixed perspectives we’ve inherited from the patriarchy and imperialism and other structures? By seeing how perspective is constructed, by seeing ourselves and others seeing.

Again and again I find, returning to Boland’s work, particularly The Lost Land and Outside History, a speaker, a woman, in her house at night, who looks out the window. She goes outside and inside and down and up the stairs. We travel with her; we see the world shift as she shifts position. “I was a child in a north-facing bedroom in / a strange country. …” she says in “The Game,” one of many moments of orienting us in a particular direction. Perspective is both physical and psychological. In “Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child’s Room,” she pivots us around the perspectives of a mother/caregiver, a woman in a suburb in an expanding city in a former colony, a self imagining: “Ellipse. Triangle. A music of ratio. / Draw these lines / against a winter dusk. …” And later, “I hang their weather in / your room, all the time wondering / just how I look from the road—” Much as she defined herself as a feminist and a poet, not a feminist poet, she resists patriarchal objectifications and simplifications of women, and also resists settling into a single point of view.

“[E]mblem of this old, / torn and traded city, / … / I turn to you … / one flawed head towards another,” she writes in “The Scar,” in which the speaker looks at a statue of Anna Liffey. History, with its fixed statuary and values, is made into another face that a human face in a particular present moment can look at, reconsider. Boland brings all this to what she once described as “eye-level.” In “Midnight Flowers,” we see the speaker seeing herself created as an object: “When I was a child a snapdragon was / held an inch from my face. Look, a voice said, this / is the color of your hair. And there it was, my head, / a pliant jewel in the hands of someone else.” In an interview with Pilar Villar, Boland describes moving the perspective of the poem from the traditional center to what had been its margins: “There's a lot of different ways of talking about changing a style. For me, I felt the interior of the poem could only be changed by changing where the poet stood in the poem.” She also explains a point she made repeatedly throughout her long career, that history is “an official version of events,” while “the past, at least as I came to see it, is a place of silences and losses and disappearances.”

Boland’s poems make us aware of the vanishing points that perspective relies on: silenced oppressions, invisible domestic work, what hasn’t been seen in the past and might not be seen even now. Writing elsewhere about Yeats, whom she admired but also saw as towering over Irish poetry in ways that foreclosed it, she says, “If, like Yeats, you were the foreground of that poem—an angry, eloquent, and isolated close-up—then what was in the background did not matter so much. If … you were lost figures in the unfocused background—where the faint shapes of beasts and trees and people happened in a simplified history—then your task was daunting.”  

Boland fundamentally shifted Irish poetry, and poetry worldwide, by moving the “unfocused background” into the foreground, and woman as objectified “motif” into the role of active, speaking and thinking subject. As she writes in the poem “Anna Liffey,” “It has taken me / All my strength to do this. / Becoming a figure in a poem. / Usurping a name and a theme.” But beyond this revolution—which she shared with feminist thinkers, and with poets she admired such as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paula Meehan—Boland, more than any other poet I know of, engages us in the ethics involved in looking. She helps us see that any perspective—by those in power narrating the official “history” or by those who have been overlooked—is situated and constructed.

In “A Different Light,” we are again both inside and outside a room, amidst a change in light and perception:

Talking just like this late at night
all depends on a sense of mystery;
the same things in a different light.

Your whiskey glass and the watercolor
just off-center are
part of this. The electric pallor

of that apple, also. And the slow
arc of an indoor palm, the vase beside it blooming
with shadows. Do you remember how

the power cuts caught us unawares?
No candles and no torch. It was high
summer. A soft brightness clung in the poplars,

for hours it seemed. When it went out,
everything we knew how
to look for had disappeared. And when light

came back, it came back as noise:
the radio; the deep freeze singing.
Afterwards we talked of it for days—

how it felt at the upstairs window,
to stand and watch and still miss the moment
of gable ends and rooftops beginning

to be rebuilt. And that split second when
you and I were, from a distance,
a neighborhood on the verge of definition.

In such a poem, we can take for granted nothing about the constructions of domestic relationships, place, or vision. Importantly, it’s not that everything “we knew” had disappeared, but “everything we knew how to look for.”

At the Stegner workshop table, Boland bristled with energy, often doodling on our poems with increasingly rapid strokes as we gave each other advice, clearly brimming with the brilliant, imperious pronouncement she was about to make on our work. She was sure of herself, but also liked to play devil’s advocate about points that hadn’t even been advocated yet; she liked to provoke and prod and see where we stood.

“Then she took a mirror, / hand-sized, enameled in green, / and turned her back to the canvas. / And stood there. / And looked in it,” she writes in a poem about her mother called “The Last Discipline.” In an interview for the Library of Congress, Boland said that witnessing her mother’s gesture taught her the “unswerving attempt to look critically at what you’ve done; to see what it is you’ve made. … [and] to be willing to reverse it if it’s wrong.” I remember when, after years of revising my own college essays and then teaching others to do the same, I first read Adrienne Rich’s “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” How had I never seen that right there in the word revision was vision? To really look at what we’ve inherited, as well as what we create, is, as Boland, as teacher and poet and essayist, also reminded us, simultaneously the simplest and hardest and most necessary work. 

Myths—which Boland was suspicious of for the same reasons she was wary of history—are often about forbidden looking. Orpheus cannot turn back and look at Eurydice as he leads her from hell. Semele cannot look on Zeus in his glory, as no mortal can, without being incinerated. Psyche cannot see that her husband is really Eros. Perseus cannot look at Medusa without turning to stone. In Stealing the Language, Alicia Ostriker describes women poets revising mythology by saying that they often “treat existing texts as fenceposts surrounding the terrain of mythic truth but by no means identical to it.” In Boland’s poems, both this mythic “terrain” and the speaker’s perspectives on it are moveable. As she once beautifully wrote, “Because of the rearrangements and the innovations of the recent past, a woman in Ireland who wishes to inscribe her life in a poem has a better chance now to move freely around within that poem…”

In her famous poem “The Pomegranate,” about the legend of Ceres and Persephone, she writes, “the best thing about the legend is / I can enter it anywhere. And have.” As if myth has physical doors that we can open and shut. Indeed, she gives us such doors. The speaker rises from her desk in an Irish suburb “in a summer twilight” and walks out into both that twilight and this myth. She walks into the myth “as a child in exile in / a city of fogs and strange consonants.” Later, she sees her daughter on the verge of entering the myth, beside “her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.” The speaker doesn’t just appear. She shows us how she moves, as in this beautiful run of pentameter: “I climb the stairs and stand where I can see.”

Boland puts us where the speaker is, in space with what surrounds her—the present and often the past, mythologies and ideologies—as she is looking. She doesn’t just tell us what it’s like to look and live as a woman or mother or person outside of her country; she doesn’t just ask us to feel swept up in these feelings; instead, she gives us a physicalized, embodied experience, which is crucial to reorienting us so we can inhabit and question perspectives. In A Journey With Two Maps, Boland describes “the elements” of the domestic poem, using language that can apply to any such embodied perspective: “intimate, uneasy, charged with a relation which is continuous and unpredictable between bodies and the spaces they inhabit.”

When Molly McCully Brown (who studied with Boland as an undergrad at Stanford) wrote of my recent book, Or What We’ll Call Desire, that “the watched have been watching”—i.e., that I have turned the gaze back on male artists and spectators by giving voice to women within (and who posed for) their works of art—I didn’t, at first, think of how much Boland’s work made this possible. That is not a slighting of her legacy, but a testament to how deeply her ways of moving inside a poem, and offering varied perspectives, have allowed me, and so many other poets, this mobility. This multi-directional, embodied seeing is at the core of what it means, for me, when Boland writes in Object Lessons, “A hundred years ago I might have been a motif in a poem. Now I could have a complex self within my own poem.”

From Boland, and later, poets and theorists including Ostriker, Rich, Anne Carson, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, and Mary Szybist, I internalized the right to be a woman who moved freely in my poems—a contemporary woman who could speak across time and space to an ancient Greek courtesan / artists’ model, as I do in my series “Letters to Phryne,” situating myself in various physical locations as I question the relationships between muse and artist, contemporary writer and muse, woman and woman. That series ends by considering the term panorama, which comes from the Greek for an unbroken view, and asking Phryne questions that have become at the heart of my own thinking and poetics: “Didn’t you see it too? / How every view keeps breaking?”  

Of course, I fail to look in as many directions as I could (and Boland would, I know, have so many ways to still school me if I could still be in her workshop), but I am trying to look more honestly, from more angles at where I have come from, and what I am saying and seeing. I deeply believe that it is the work of an attentive writer/viewer/reader/human to consider which lines are being drawn, and how they “jut” against which horizons, including the ones each of us is making.

Tonight, in an upstairs room in Idaho, I sit at a desk piled with Boland’s books, drafts, a pair of reading glasses I have recently started wearing because I am twice the age I was when Boland signed To Sylvia Teague, all best wishes Eavan Boland. The young woman I was on that Florida night didn’t usually get books signed, as she didn’t for years after, being shy around famous writers, and believing it was only the words in the poems she really cared about. But that night, listening to Boland, she understood, without really understanding yet, that she was being offered a vision that mattered to her. So, she stood in line with this book, which had been pre-signed, so, in truth, there are two signatures, one almost vertical, one horizontal, their looping letters barely touching each other. A week ago, almost two decades after I inherited this book back from my mother, and over a decade since I had the fortune to be Boland’s student, I read from The Lost Land in a Zoom tribute to Boland with other former and current Stegners. In the grid of faces—from Gabrielle Calvocoressi to Tracy K. Smith to Elizabeth Bradfield to Shara Lessley to Sara Michas-Martin to Maria Hummel to Esther Lin—were so many poets whose work I admire, who have helped shape my writing, and in whose care with perspective, and complex, careful ways of situating themselves, I see some of Boland’s legacy. The tribute ended with Lin reading from Boland’s “Anna Liffey,” a poem that returns to the image—here beautifully in the present tense— “There is now / A woman in a doorway.”

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Editor's Note: For more on Eavan Boland's legacy listen to this recent episode of Poetry Off the Shelf: Heroes History Forgets