For Eavan Boland, History has always begun in the upper case. Her poems are testimonies, the stories of many struggles to come out of the shadows of literary, national and gendered pasts. In Boland's most recent work the terms "colonial", "violence", "empire" and "nation" have been edging towards joining History in a dark pantheon of awful certainties. Such solidities are then chipped away at by Boland, pitting the paradoxical strength of the small voice against the booming of ideological monoliths.
But this is treacherous terrain. Its dangers lie in either too convincingly showing History to be an immovable object or hacking at its pretensions so vigorously as to bring the whole edifice down. In Boland's new collection, Code, there are moments which shake the somewhat calcified History which loomed over her previous collection, The Lost Land. And it is then that Boland's poetry finds itself having to react to echoes from its own past.
Code begins with a sequence entitled 'Marriage'. The first poem considers how "Art and marriage" might allow a couple to "make their vows" under the frowning "gaze" of "History". While this looks forward to the sequence's resolution, the second poem, 'Against Love Poetry', is a crunchingly, deliberately unpoetic prose poem which openly rejects the trammels of the love lyric, considering the form to be as closed and masculine as the institution of marriage itself. From these bases, the sequence begins to weave the personal with the History which silences it.
This promises a tense dynamic, and the sequence starts to find its adventurousness in recapturing the shared pasts of parenthood, as in the nearly epigrammatic 'Then'.
There are conscious dead ends, too. Boland tries legend and myth (a healthy alternative to History in earlier works), but finds that the "you" who is addressed in 'Embers' is uninterested, and by the time we get to 'Once' Boland has decided that "The lovers in an Irish story never had good fortune". The frank disappointments of what cannot be shared in a marriage are weighed against the simplicity of imagined and recalled togetherness. Through conversation, through mornings lying in bed, through "listening to our child crying", above all through "constancy" and "endurance", Boland tentatively recuperates an ideal of marriage which looked like being impossible at the beginning of the book. This is a brave form of self-examination in which the broadly "political" Boland challenges one version of herself with another.
This tentative dialectic is disappointingly less active in the other poems in Code (also the title of the second sequence which makes up the book). Here a sense of entrapment is continually reinforced: there are prisoners, emigrants, exiles, forever-lost pasts, and signposts missed. The poems in Code slip into an unhappy harmony which is easier to imagine than the glinting fractiousness littering "Marriage". Boland has found a way of speaking from under the shadow of History, but her poetry benefits from the odd, difficult dash out of that shadow.
It's a tired truism to talk about the difficulty of Medbh McGuckian's poetry. Her new collection, Drawing Ballerinas, will no doubt be met with the usual mixture of acclaim and bemusement. McGuckian (in)famously toys with syntax and semantics. As ever, she is elusive and challenging. But by now we should realise that her poetry is also a lyrically gorgeous experience. McGuckian combines the extremities of poetic sound and sense, the aural and the cerebral, and in Drawing Ballerinas her half-invented language is brilliantly and movingly inflected by the noises and silences of post-ceasefire Northern Ireland. The book's title poem has a note explaining that Matisse said he spent the worst years of the war "drawing ballerinas". Like Picasso's "the war is in these paintings" (used as an epigraph for a previous McGuckian collection, Captain Lavender), Matisse's words and art stand here as a warning that it's a mistake to read McGuckian's poetry as removed from the real world. Drawing Ballerinas reverberates with the shock of very real worlds and words ("bullets", "guns", "war", "tanks"), and very real politics ("English", for example, is used as a provocatively precise adjective several times).
The delicate balances of the peace process have made political histories curiously less audible. McGuckian reminds us of how we got here, but more importantly she finds ways of reminding us of what we're forgetting. 'The Dead are More Alive' commemorates the wrenching silences of victimhood without a hint of over-dramatisation in the poet's voice. The first line of 'Closed Eye Song' echoes the dark humour of its myopic title: "Silky peace, perfect police". If only. And a repeated motif in the volume is the kiss, a tender, erotic togetherness, but also, potentially, Judas's betrayal. By turns wry, wise and sensual, Drawing Ballerinas is extraordinary for its deeply ethical and humane poeticisation of politics, the past and the personal.
Colin Graham lectures in Irish Writing at Queen's University, Belfast. His book, Deconstructing Ireland, is published this month by Edinburgh University Press