A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

Boland's very personal experiences transpire into the journey of every reader of this book. The collection of her studies of woman poets in the second half of the book is one of the best I have ever come across.

To talk about a journey, indicates retrospection; the recollection of moments and situations now seen as seminal, and while such moments and situations can seem formative over a life which has been arrived at, but which also include, realised in retrospect that they need, should they arise again and be recognized as such, to be attended by ‘the ability to listen’ for without it, a conversation is failed. (p.240-1) This was the situation of an 18 year old first year university student, meeting, by chance, ‘in the empty spaces that would open around me when I became a working poet…. should find a woman who had written poetry in my country. She had a story to tell. I had a future to promise her. But the conversation never happened.’The puzzle, hence the two maps, is the desire to disentangle two rivers, which share common features in order to coalesce them as the sea might. On one side there is a woman’s appraisal of her own development as a woman, wife, and mother, and on the other her development as a poet and a poet’s sensibility towards and of others seeing and understanding in the same way, both permeated by her sense of being Irish. There used to be the old feminist mantra that history is his-story, but there is a history here which is very much her-story, of a growth away from lyricism to the politic of person and community. Of course the two rivers that mingle and blend cannot be demingled or unblended, for that is the nature of water, and one form of a resolution that she considers with some acuity and insight is the movement from ‘I’ to ‘we’. (p.54)While the content is autobiographical, she talks about every poet having an anti-history, attended perhaps by the questions: ‘What are you writing? Is it important enough?’ and the anti-history is full of ghosts. ‘Later I learned that it (the aesthetic being the idea of a sublime) belongs everywhere, and to no one person. Which means it can be a common possession. Standing in a room in the winter half-light before the wonder of a new child is aesthetics.’ (p.74-5) There is a very poignant account in ‘Translating the Underworld’, about a poem in an anthology on poems by women poets centering on WWII, in German, and she had sufficient knowledge of German for a chord to be struck, and her search led to the discovery of a modern Ceres (Demeter) Persephone story, about a half Jewish mother (Elizabeth Langgasser) and her daughter being separated in Auschwitz, and being briefly reunited after the war. The section in the book that she calls maps, are her responses to a number of women poets, beginning with Adrienne Rich, and including Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Browning, Denise Levertov. The book ends with ‘Letters to a young woman poet,’ which is not a pastiche of Rilke’s essay.The writing is not linear, we return to the same point that is not the same point we previously visited because we go off on another journey, just like a conversation, and the reader takes on the role of the other person in the conversation, and of course any questions that arise, are likely to be, with writing so lucid and as luminous as it is in places, will be the ones that we need to ask ourselves. Perhaps this collection goes someway towards a conversation she never had.

A detailed, thought-provoking, honest and inspiring sharing of the maps that guided Eavon Boland's own poetry journey in a world where female poets weren't always recognised as equal to their male counterparts. I especially enjoyed her chapter on 'The Communal Art of Paula Meehan' and how studying Latin helped her value precision in language when developing her own poetic craft. This book deserves more than one reading and is one I will continue to dip in and out of.

a beautifully written and truthful, deeply insightful account of finding an artistic identity.I loved it - one of the best books I have ever read.

Excellent condition