“The news is so joyous” was the first thing that poet Paula Meehan said when I sat down to speak with her, a week on from Trinity’s announcement of the decision to rename the Berkeley Library as The Eavan Boland Library. Over the course of two hours, we discussed Boland’s life and work in the context of this commemoration. I wanted to get to the bottom of why the decision had been made, and what the decision may mean for Trinity, for Dublin, and for Irish life. First, we discussed history. The history department’s library will be housed in ‘The Boland’, fittingly, as Boland’s work is haunted by history. Boland saw herself as being ‘outside history’, meaning that, as a women, she could take no active role in the story of the nation that was still desperate to settle on a solid basis of cultural identity distinct from that of The UK. Boland identified women as only being ‘subjects’ in Irish poetry and history, rather than direct participants. Their lives, their struggles, their joys and their stories were not considered worthy of the sacred tradition of poetry. Instead, they were symbols that poets could project meaning on to.
Women in Irish poetry were spéirmhná, goddesses who appeared in dreams to deliver messages to brave Irish men motivating them to fight and die for their nation. Their nation, too, was a woman. The Shan Van Vocht. The Bog Queen. Leda. Cathleen Ní Houlihan. Dark Rosaleen. These images gave little room for women to find a role in the reborn Ireland.
In the face of this, Boland, with her own complicated ‘Irishness’, confronted it in her writing, and made Irish women and their issues active elements in the story of the nation. Boland’s grappling with history, especially the Irish Famine, saw her develop a poetry that was similar to a social history. She placed the real, lived stories of people at the centre, as the beating heart, of her art.
Poems like ‘Quarantine’ and ‘Making Money’ bring the struggles of people in the past to the reader. The reader is confronted by these truths. Boland forces the reader to the altar and reconsider their understanding of and place in history. As Meehan told me; “[Boland] knows that history tells us what happened in the past, poetry tells us how it felt to live that past. She distinguished between history and the past. History is the meaning that accumulates around the past”. Boland’s womanhood provided a much needed shake-up of Irish writing in the twentieth century. Meehan says; “she really redefined what it meant to be an Irish poet – as she said it herself, ‘the stereotypical Irish poet would be male, and his subject was more likely to be a gun than a baby’”.
Boland wrote about her children, her everyday household activities, and the ordinary objects that she interacted with day after day. She elevated the common and banal things in her life to being worthy of poetry and art. She follows on from Partick Kavanagh in this sense, she understands that “naming these things is the love-act and its pledge”. Meehan talked about how Boland blazed a trail by writing about washing machines and the suburban house in the shadow of the Dublin Mountains, how she wrestled with “the revelations of motherhood and the sustaining stories of the suburbs. By paying absolute attention to the life she was living, she was determined to bring that into the Irish poem, and by doing that, she opened up new territory.” Meehan and Boland’s paths first crossed when Meehan was studying in the US, and Boland was asked to be the outside scrutineer of her creative thesis.
Meehan recounted receiving Boland’s one-page response; “She put her finger exactly on the fracture between a working-class, demotic English of Dublin, my native tongue, and the strictures of an education. Those two energies were at war in my work. That was the area of promise”. This sensitivity and astuteness is to be found all throughout Boland’s poetry, and in her work to bring attention to voices on the edges.
Meehan said that Boland taught “listening as much as speaking and writing… to listen especially to the voices that you are discouraged from hearing because they’re often the voices that are going to shake up and feed the moment.” Meehan was herself one of these voices that Boland helped to platform. She had a deep compassion for, and a special kind of endorsement of those who were coming in from the edges into what was quite a coded and hermetic practice. Meehan relates this to Boland’s strong will; “when [Boland] was on the Arts Council, she banged the table, asking “why are we giving all the grants to men, there are loads of women applying for grants”, she was used to hearing the old trope: ‘you write like a man’”.
In A Poet’s Dublin, Meehan sees “the new Irish” as those who were following her through the door that Boland had opened; “with this huge inward migration, people don’t arrive just as themselves – they carry their ghosts, they carry their languages, they carry also the received ideas around what a poem is, no more than we do. This creates new traditions.”
There is immense complexity to the act of naming, and this specific act of naming is no different. We cannot know what ‘The Eavan Boland Library’ will mean to students of Trinity in the future, if it means anything at all. I asked Meehan about how, in her famous poem ‘Them Ducks Died for Ireland’, her view of “the gesture of / commemorating heroes in bronze or stone” is as “fragile as a breathmark on the windowpane”. In many ways, Meehan says, this act of commemoration is just as fragile; “she’s very vivid and alive to me, but in five or six generations she will be history – the fragility of the lived life – the fragility of memory”. However, there are many things we can take from it now.
One thing that Meehan saw as a positive was that, in renaming the library, “Trinity, which naturally, as an institution, tends towards conservatism, has chosen one of the great radicals of our time”. Right now, the celebration of such a radical voice could be seen, if in aspiration at least, as an endorsement of “the students who stood against slavery and stand up for divestment, for justice in the world they live in. It’s not about back-correcting, because we don’t undo that past, but we can change the future of that past.” Yes, this is the first building on campus named after a woman, but this is not a building after a woman, this is a building named after Eavan Boland. Boland herself recognised this in her poem ‘Anna Liffey’; ‘In the end It will not matter/ That I was a woman…/ In the end/ Everything that burdened and distinguished me /Will be lost in this: I was a voice.’
