In his poem "To Juan at the Winter Solstice", Robert Graves writes: "There is one story, and one story only." For Graves it was love, for Eavan Boland it continues to be the idea of a nation, as her latest collection, The Lost Land (Carcanet Press, £7.95 in UK), testifies.
The opening poem, "My Country in Darkness", establishes the profoundly elegiac tone which characterises this book. Boland's lament here is for her "mother tongue" and its vibrant poetic tradition. Not unlike Colum's "Poor Scholar" or Yeats's "Fisherman", in Boland's poem the last vestiges of indigenous cultural value are preserved in the person of a friendless vagrant:
All of it-
Limerick, the Wild Geese and what went before-
falters into cadence before he sleeps:
he shuts his eyes. Darkness falls on it.
Lest we be puzzled by this ghostly invocation, Boland informs us of her intention in "Witness": "Out of my mouth they come: / The spurred and booted garrisons. / The men and women / they dispossessed." It is a familiar theme. Throughout her career, Boland has frequently declared her resolve to speak on behalf of those whom the master narratives of history and myth have neglected, particularly women. Her prose memoir and ars poetica, Object Lessons, contains an eloquent account of this struggle. The reason behind it is harder to understand. Boland has claimed that as a woman writer she was disabled by the traditional constructs of femininity which surrounded her and that the life of a woman and that of a poet were "oil and water and could not be mixed". Consequently, her work displays a suspicion of poetry's stylistic appurtenances, which she deems to be implicated in the very act of oppression, of cultural and sexual coercion.
This trend is continued in The Lost Land. Repeatedly, Boland writes as though raw memory itself were sufficient: "It was an Irish summer. It was wet./ It was a job. I was seventeen." The jerky punctuation, the proliferation of full stops, and the use of repetition give this poetry a bland and curiously passive surface. It is as though Boland is so wary of artifice, of what she has elsewhere called "sarcastic craftsmanship", that she has conceived a dislike of her medium. But as the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas (himself no stranger to nationalist concerns) has claimed in a similar context, "we can easily reach a stage when one is praising a poet because he has written a certain kind of poem and not because he has written a good poem".
In The Lost Land there are glimpses of the lyric gift and descriptive powers which distinguished Boland's early poetry:
The blossom on the apple tree is still in shadow, its petals half-white and filled with water at the core, in which the freshness and secrecy of dawn are stored even in the dark.
Such moments are too often sacrificed to the delineation of Boland's oppression at the hands of her country's colonisers or her male artistic forebears. The influence of American poet Adrienne Rich on Boland's work is obvious. But whereas Rich's adoption of more open forms after the tight, "well-mannered" verse of her early years coincided with social upheaval, political awareness and radical lesbian feminism, Boland's motivation is less clear. Indeed, her preoccupation with "Mother Ireland" seems strangely apolitical, and uninterested in the actualities of social and economic oppression evident in our booming "post-feminist" era.
And of course two of the century's greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvet aeva, had first-hand experience of oppression of a particularly unpleasant kind, but they didn't blame it on Pushkin or Tolstoy. In Boland's case, a poem such as "Dublin 1959" does not work because of the deadpan presentation of its subject matter, a child's sense of the absence of Ireland's past in its depressing 1950s present.
It is precisely because these poems fail to ignite as artefacts that their content may not provoke as much sympathy as Boland intends. After all, isn't a fundamental part of the poet's task to find a form adequate to or worthy of her subject? Boland's hostility to form and its equivalence for her with male oppression are exemplified in "Formal Feeling". But reading these lines, "How can I know a form unless I see it?/ How can I see it now?" and "This time- and this you did not ordain-/ I am changing the story", one realises that Boland is still in the throes of her tussle with received artistic notions. She has fashioned a drama and a voice out of the dynamic of that conflict itself, and not, crucially, out of its overcoming. The result is that the majority of these poems read like mere declarations of intent, or like notes towards the supreme fiction that is yet to emerge.