Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Part III of the book opens with “Listen. This is the Noise of Myth.” The poem meditates on the difference between myth and life, and the consolations of myth. It begins with “the story of a man and woman” under a willow and beside a weir, near a river in a wooded clearing. They are “fictions of my purpose,” the poet reminds us in the second stanza, before evoking in sensuous detail their wintry flight through the Midlands, to get to that willow. Returning to the start of her story, the middle of theirs, the poet raises our expectations that something is about to happen: “Will we see/ hungers eased after months of hiding?/ Is there a touch of heat in that light?” Instead of fulfilling our expectations, she asks our forgiveness for setting “the truth to rights.” They never made love; there was no journey; no woodland and no river and no weir. The man and the woman were never the poet’s. Only the myth, or fiction, is hers, only “this sequence of evicted possibilities” called Invention. Le...

As I read The Journey , I am rediscovering an old truth: good poems are those that cannot be paraphrased satisfactorily. Paraphrasing them is like reporting on the memory of one’s last conversation with someone dear. “The Wild Spray” is about the poet’s marriage: the indistinct happiness of the early days clarifying into present reality, or, as the poem puts it, “a random guess becoming a definition.” Those early days were an ironstone jug filled with long-stemmed flowers whose names the poet learned only much later: true rose, mountain rose, asparagus fern, rosemary, forsythia. The summer air had a consistency of milk. The lights on the mountain were sharp like crocuses seen through the snowfall of darkness, whereas the light on the street, the streetlamp in the rain, was a planet of tears near the whitebeam trees. __________ Reading “The Wild Spray” From Paris you brought back your first gift for me, a stainless steel wine holder, arched back in a single curve, seen from the side, an...

This next book is dedicated to the poet’s mother, and the first poem “I Remember” is about the mother who is an artist. The poet first describes the “washed out” or “tinted” light in the drawing room (in “bombed-out, post-war London”) in which she sits, “helplessly,” as a nine-year-old to be painted by her mother. Her mother’s brushes stick out of the jar like the “spines” of a porcupine, suggesting the artist’s prickly and self-protective attitude. When the poet is not being “composed” by her mother, she feels herself to be an “interloper” in this workroom. In the morning when she enters the room in her “high, fawn socks,” the room had been shocked into a glacier of cotton sheets thrown over the almond and vanilla silk of the French Empire chairs. To the poet, the mother covers her fine nature—those French empire chairs— with a cold exterior. This poem marks a thematic change from the previous book. Night Feed analyzes and quarrels with the relationship between male artists and fema...

“The New Pastoral” introduces the last group of poems in the book. Whereas men discovered flint and wheel to read his world (in the form of the pastoral), the female speaker is “a “displaced person/ in a pastoral chaos.” She is “no shepherdess” and hears the “loud distress” of the herds when they are slaughtered. The lamb “unsuckled” alienates her from this male version of pastoral; it reminds her that the pastoral has a violent past in which she once participated. The pastoral poems that follow traffic with the trope of metamorphosis. In ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark,’ the speaker wishes to teach her next sister that it is better to give in to Apollo than to save herself for the trap of domestic life. Apollo’s “rough heat” will keep the sister warm, and give her good memories which will return to her when she sees the way the chestnut tree “thrusts and hardens.” In “The Woman Changes Her Skin,” the speaker, tired of hiding her aged face with cosmetics, changes herself into a snake. ...

Boland writes quite a bit about the Muse. “Tirade for the Epic Muse’ is the companion piece to “Tirade for the Mimic Muse” in the earlier book In Her Own Image . In the later poem, the poet berates the Epic Muse for allowing herself to be used to glorify war. Now that “they” are done with her, the poet tells the wretched Muse to find peace “in my kitchen, in my epic,” where her machines will “know you for their own.” To write about—to—one’s source of inspiration is to detach oneself from it, so that one can analyze it, punish it, and, perhaps, reform it. To leave one’s muse unnamed is to leave it unexamined. In “The Mother Muse,” the poet seeks inspiration in a mother wiping her child’s mouth with a nappy liner. If only the poet could trace this mother-figure back to her roots, she might teach the poet to be a “sibyl,” to speak at last “my mother tongue.” According to Robert Graves, the Muse is a mother-goddess, the source, the origin. Boland’s search for her mother muse swims in the m...

The next three poems are also about the relationship between the poet and her baby daughter. They are, however, more ambitious in their imaginative leaps, and the language gets hotter. They share the same method: first they describe a painting or a childhood memory, then they compare that description with the poet’s present as a suburban mother. The juxtaposition of these poems encourages one to evaluate the success of the same method in each instance. In “Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray,” the poet thinks that the still-life painter’s true subject is not the late melons, grapes and lemons, but “the space between them.” This restful space gives the fruits the feel of “an assembly of possibilities;/ a deliberate collection of cross purposes.” But this same space, in the poem’s turn, also disguises “the equation that kills,” that “you are my child and between us are// spaces. Distances. Growing to infinities.” I think the conjunction between painting and maternity here is too forced. Too m...

The next six poems, as promised by the book’s title, are about caring for the poet’s baby daughter. Their language is simple, almost prosaic, their imagery temporal and domestic, their movement tentative, their tone hushed. Their short lines are determined by the phrase more often than not. Except for “Endings,” the last poem of the group, they are written in regular stanzas, each of seven, four, five or three lines. Each stanza usually has a pair of end-rhymes in no predetermined place, but the last line of each stanza often rhymes with a foregoing line. “Night Feed” takes place at dawn. That time is the daughter’s season, “The moment daisies open,” and “the hour mercurial rainwater/ Makes a mirror for sparrows.” The poet-mother tiptoes into the nursery to feed the baby, and when the feed is over, the daughter opens her eyes “Birth-colored and offended.” Now dawn becomes the time of endings (“Worms turn./ Stars go in”), and poet and daughter “begin/ The long fall from grace.” In “Befo...

Back to Boland. The title of this collection indicates the main subject, that of maternity. The first poem “Domestic Interior” is “for Kevin,” apparently the poet’s husband. An ekphrastic poem in part, it names the artist—Van Eyck—but not the painting. The description seems to fit The Arnolfini Portrait . The painting is of a recently married couple, but the poem describes only the woman who is “as round/ as the new ring/ ambering her finger” and who “has long since been bedded.” The man appears in the poem in the figure of the artist “by whose edict” the woman will stay “burnished, fertile,/ on her wedding day,/ interred in her joy.” The pejorative diction here suggests that the male gaze is imperious (“edict”), deceptive (“burnished”), exploitative (”fertile”), and, perhaps, even murderous (“interred”). Though the eye of the poet’s husband is “loving, bright/ and constant,” yet it shows this woman only “in her varnishes.” The poet opposes the superficial male gaze with “a way of life...

My poet is going for an extreme makeover, or, more accurately, an extreme strip-down. In the opening poem “Tirade for the Mimic Muse,” the poet calls her Muse a “ruthless bitch” whose blushers and brushes could not hide “a dead millennium” in her eyes nor make her “crime” cosmetic. What is the Muse’s crime? With what drums and dances, what deceits Rituals and flatteries of war, Chants and pipes and witless empty rites And war-like men And wet-eyed patient women You did protect yourself from horrors, From the lizarding of eyelids From the whiskering of nipples, From the slow betrayals of our bedroom mirrors— How you fled The kitchen screw and the rack of labour, The wash thumbed and the dish cracked, The scream of beaten women, The crime of babies battered, The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief That seeks asylum behind suburb walls . . . You get the idea. The poet berates herself for writing about past wars and not the present ones, the wars abroad and not the wars at home, wars in t...

“Dependence Day” praises the snail for its industry; then commiserates with the silkworm for being forgotten when “skirts come pouring down like milk”; then asks the shadow “How necessary was your hurt?”; and finally prays to Christ to instruct the poet So my heart might not harden Since yours at last found light relief: Sleeping partners in a garden, Your final acolyte a thief. The association between the addressees is loose and light. To its delight, the poem finds surprising phrasing for old ideas. I am surprised by its religious spirit. __________ Reading “Dependence Day” Today I will acknowledge my supporters. My chair, my desk, my wardrobe rails, but not my bed, that edge, and certainly not the stair that promises and fails.

After “Naoise at Four,” three out of the following four poems deal with the theme of children as victims. In “Anon,” the poem is compared to a “love child” the author abandons without giving it his name. In “Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan,” the mother-speaker prays for the woods to become a broad ocean, so that her forest-loving son, now a swan, may see not “the cold crest,/ But branches of the whitebeam and the maple.” “O Fons Bandusiae,” a translation of a Horatian ode (Book 3, XIII), devotes a stanza to the kid goat to be sacrificed to the sacred fount. And tomorrow we will bring A struggling kid, his temples sore With early horns, as sacrifice. Tomorrow his new trumpeting Will come to nothing, when his gore Stains and thaws your bright ice. I don’t know how the Latin compares with this, but here are the same lines in an English translation by A. S. Kline I found by googling. Kline says he/she follows the original Latin meter, and gives a reasonably close English version. tomor...

The other two family poems are “The Family Tree” and “Naoise at Four.” “The Family Tree” begins with playful wit: “I miss them as though they existed.” The poet finds unexpectedly her aunt and uncles “In this woods growing as trees.” Her uncles, “unable even once/ To shed their gravity” are like the yew “Which will not lose a leaf for spring and autumn.” The poem turns dark when it sees in the laburnums cousins who “Will wage their sterile fight, their arid battle/ Pleasuring to poison enemy cattle,” but who are “Innocent children now.” In the end, the poet sees a reversal of her playful first imagining: “I see/ Only woods lost in my family tree.” The poem is too bloodless to support such a conclusion, I think. The nice bits are the description: the yew-uncles with their “Serious loop and swag of dark branches,” and the laburnum-cousins “lace at the wrists, / Ruffles at the throat.” In the Ulster Cycle of mythology, Naoise and his two brothers were waylaid by King Conchobar who murdere...

Love poems: not of the eternal horseman, but of the mortal husband. The book begins with “The Other Woman,” and, after a squad of four social poems, returns to the hearth with an album of five love poems. In “The Other Woman,” the poet knows she cannot rival the ideal woman her husband commands to come, “like a harem wife,” into his novels. The fictitious Other is beautiful, young, immortal, obedient; she does not bind him to “the married state”; she is perfect because she is perfectly shaped by and for his desire. Yet the poet insists at the end of the poem that she has “the better bargain” compared to her rival, For I imagine she has grown strange To you among the syntax and sentences By which you distance her and would exchange Her speaking part for any of our silences. This turn in the final quatrain does not convince. The poem offers no reason why the ideal woman would grow strange to the husband, nor evidence that he wishes to distance her or exchange “her speaking part for any o...

The subject of both “The War Horse” and “A Soldier’s Son” is war and the pity of war; the second poem kills me, whereas the first, the title poem of the collection, leaves me untouched. Clip-clopping down the street, a horse brushes against the speaker’s hedge, and becomes a rather heavy-handed metaphor for a far-off war that frightens but affects the neighborhood little. “No great harm done,” the speaker tries to calm her fear, since, from the hedge, only one leaf, one rose and one crocus were torn. Only one of each: this horse is a mighty selective destroyer. Here the rhetoric of the poem takes over any realism. The tone in the poem also wavers uncertainly. The torn rose is described fancifully as a “mere/ Line of defence against him, a volunteer,/ You might say.” The nonchalance of “You might say” clashes with the melodramatic comparisons of the flowers to “one of the screamless dead,” and “Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated.” The striking metaphor at the opening—the horse sta...

What happened? How did Boland’s poetry acquire, as if suddenly, a depth of emotion, an individual voice, an unforced authority it did not have before? The spiritual event, if such it was, seemed to be the discovery of the intractability of the world. As the wife-speaker of the first poem “The Other Woman” puts it: “I know you have a world I cannot share.” The world refuses poetry. When a child is murdered, how can we think of writing a poem about it? And yet poets do, for a variety of reasons, noble and ignoble, but also for the un-ignorable need to say something about it. So, in “Child of Our Time,” Boland finds a way to write about the murder, a way of grappling with a resisting world that is, at the same time, an embrace. Her way lies in tragic paradox: the child we should have known how to teach teaches us instead. The opening lines of the first stanza set up the paradox: Yesterday I knew no lullaby But you have taught me overnight to order This song. The second stanza describes wh...

Verse drama is dead, and attempts to resurrect it only raise a zombie. Until someone comes along and proves the genre ripe and the climate right for a revival. Boland’s extract from her play ‘Femininity and Freedom’ is not it; it proves only how easy it is to sound archaic or awkward when writing a blank verse play. Deirdre envies Cathal for her freedom to slip into the woods, whereas she has to prettify herself to receive High King Conchubar’s wooing. Cathal points out the dangers in the wood, which is “As full of snares and monotony as this court.” The 34-line extract is too short to flesh out the characters, so it is impossible to understand why Cathal warns of the adders “Coiled at first like bracelets in the grass,” and of berries “Which in the mouth suddenly strangle breath/ And then blacken the face and foul the blood.” Is she persuading Deidre to accept her courtly life? Is she appealing to Deidre’s sense of adventure? Is she, spitefully, increasing Deidre’s envy of her? I cann...

New Territory ends with a re-working of this Irish myth from the Mythological Cycle. Written in 38 ottava rima stanzas—one of Yeats’s favorite stanzas—the narrative tells of the love between Aengus and Etain. The famed beauty of Queen Etaine is wonderfully evoked: And gold so intricate in Etain’s hair No one could guess if the light scattering Were a woman’s beauty or a queen’s treasure. When Etain is changed into a dragonfly by a jealous Druid, Aengus builds “a bower of four seasons” for her, essentially ensuring, for her, time stands still. Then, swept away by a druidic storm, she arrives at a royal palace, and a bit of marvelous description: And there she flew above a royal palace Whose roof, involved and circled like a rose, Bore mosaics like a clutch of crocuses And marble whiter than the lily grows. Etain the dragonfly is swallowed by a queen along with her wine, and is reborn as a human. The rebirth is described as a prison for the true Etain, who does not remember her former s...

New Territory was published in 1967 when Boland was only twenty-three. It is remarkably accomplished technically, and unabashed about its poetic ambition. It opens with the poem “The Poets” in which the title creatures, though made “For the shovel and worm,” make themselves, after their death, “absentee landlord of the dark.” The landlord metaphor is striking but also literary: there is no sense in the poem of the word’s historical baggage in Ireland. The same literariness pervades the book. It treats of Greek figures like Athene and Oedipus at Colonus; of Biblical figures like Isaiah; of historical figures like Emperor Constantine and the Black Prince; of art figures like Chardin; and of Irish figures like Lir’s son and Egan O’Rahilly (the last of the great Irish Gaelic poets). The impression given is that of a well-read student. In the treatment of these figures, the poems rehearse the idea of life as schooling for greatness, and the idea of death as premature expulsion. When imagin...

from 23 Poems A river runs through these two adolescent poems. In “Liffeytown,” a delicate lyric, each of the three stanzas ends with the haunting refrain: O swan by swan my heart goes down Through Dublin town, through Dublin town. In “The Liffey beyond Islandbridge,” the river runs past town into a pastoral scene, with grass in place of iron, with swans preening, white abandoned sea birds, a cat among daffodils, an old man under a tree, all enveloped in “the shaken warmth of early March.” The speaker knows that even further down the river, beyond the river bend, Are spaces teemed with cities which must Strike a destiny but prefers, for time’s being, to flow with the river’s “aimless miles.” If the sense of literary destiny is strong, so, too, is the sense of the literary tradition. The word “wanders,” which appears in both poems, invokes both Wordsworth of the daffodils, and Yeats of the swans. Yeats’s influence also appears in the diction of ghostly enchantment in the first poem. Tho...

from binkrozby (of PFFA): George Gordon Lord Byron The Destruction of Sennacherib The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown. For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still! And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride; And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow, and the rust ...