A Woman Without a Country

Eavan Boland

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781847774736
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in Eavan Boland's new collection consider questions of inheritance and identity, of what is handed down and what is lost. Boland's poems are acts of preservation: they are aware of the significance of objects, memories, words, in keeping alive what we would 'otherwise lose / without thinking'. At the same time, they are a holding to account, addressing the damage wrought by that other inheritance, 'the art of empire', 'the business... of colony'. In the title sequence, Boland seeks to restore voice and place to those who, like her grandmother, 'lived and died outside history', skilled in '... silence'.

The Trials of our Faith

The Trials of our Faith

The Lamb of God was laid down once

On white satin, finished in gold edging,

Pressed into a vestment.

I listened to chains singing as

Incense rose to the glass-skinned, sea-green

Saints and martyrs.

Now in the half-lit, humidified

Air of the Museum

I lean over to see

A bruised Psalter

Dug up by a bulldozer in a Tipperary field,

Its thousand-year-old page lying open:

Yea, let them be put to shame and perish.

And now our Christian history appears

Re-written on the skins of flayed animals,

The cured hides:

Their last cries sealed in this vellum

That has been freeze-dried,

painstakingly restored.

And will never heal.

The Moving Statue

There is always a first garden.

Learning the crab apple tree.

Hearing the word shoo for magpies,

and dapple for the first time.

Tended light lay every day

that summer enveloping

apple trees, bell-like fuchsias,

the low slope of an incline

five miles south of Kinsale.

Where in a tangle of spruce,

pine, sycamore, beside

a thick swivel of lilac

and a sign pointing to Cork

a statue of the Virgin stood

back from a balustrade,

the crown of her head haloed

with small electric bulbs

while blue concrete letters

under her feet spelled out

I am the Immaculate Conception

while the familiar news

of guns in moonless darkness

and snipers at dawn

was upstaged by the story

of a woman who stopped

by the grotto in Ballinspittle

and saw a statue move.

It was a warm summer,

the days starved of rain.

Soon it would be harvest,

time to save the hay,

holidaymakers watching

their train windows filling

with the crop laid in swatches,

left to dry for hours as

the light grew less.

And the Blessed Virgin

in her accustomed place

harvested the longing

seen on warm evenings

in every upturned face

as the radio brought news

of wonders and illusions:

the Virgin’s hands unfolding,

an entire statue rising

an inch above its pedestal

while a whole town abandoned

its fields and supper tables,

its nights of cow bingo,

the roads clogged with cars,

new visitors learning

directions to the grotto:

a countryside perfecting

its discipline of yearning.

Then the season changed.

Upstairs in my room,

the Dublin hills hidden,

I took down my notebook –

your eyes shall be opened –

and left the page unwritten.

Early twilights rested

on the incline to t...