A Woman Without a Country E-Book

Eavan Boland

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

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'.

Leseprobe

EAVAN BOLAND

A Woman Without a Country

The outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country’.

Virginia Woolf

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are made to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems appeared: The American Scholar, The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PN Review, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Tin House and The Yale Review.

‘Amethyst Beads’ appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ ‘Poem-a-Day’ programme.

‘A Soldier in the 28th Massachusetts’ first appeared in Lines in Long Array, the US National Portrait Gallery’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

‘Becoming Anne Bradstreet’ was published in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries (Folger Library, 2012).

‘A Wife’s Lament’ was published in The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (W.W. Norton, 2012).

‘The Port of New York: 1956’ first appeared in A Poetic Celebration of the Hudson River, sponsored by the Port Authority of New York (Carcanet Press, 2009).

My thanks to Jill Bialosky, Kevin Casey, Michael Schmidt and Jody Allen Randolph.

Contents

Title PageEpigraphAcknowledgementsSong and ErrorThe Lost Art of Letter WritingTalking to my Daughter Late at NightAdvice to an ImagistCityscapeOne Thought, One Grace, One Wonder at the LeastAmethyst BeadsNostalgiaEurydice SpeaksSong and ErrorAsA Woman Without a CountrySea ChangeLesson 1Art of EmpireLesson 2Studio Portrait 1897Lesson 3The Long Evenings of their LeavetakingsLesson 4I Think of HerLesson 5AnonymityLesson 6A Woman Without a CountryThe Trials of our FaithThe Trials of our FaithThe Moving StatueThe Blue RoseAn Island of DaughtersFor that Called Body is a Portion of SoulAn Irish GeorgicMirror. MemoryThe Wife’s LamentMarriagesWedding PoemEdge of EmpireShameEdge of Empire1. The Hat2. Reading the Victorian Novel3. Nationhood: Two Failed Sonnets4. Edge of EmpireA Soldier in the 28th MassachusettsRe-reading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in a Changed IrelandThe Port of New York: 1956Becoming Anne BradstreetAbout the AuthorAlso by Eavan Boland from Carcanet PressCopyright

Song and Error

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

The ratio of daylight to handwriting

Was the same as lace-making to eyesight.

The paper was so thin it skinned air.

The hand was fire and the page tinder.

Everything burned away except the one

Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside

For the long evenings of their leavetakings,

Always asking after what they kept losing,

Always performing – even when a shadow

Fell across the page and they knew the answer

Was not forthcoming – the same action:

First the leaning down, the pen becoming

A staff to walk fields with as they vanished

Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,

The lighter stroke, which brought back

Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel

Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass

Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn

Again just in time for the May Novenas

Recited in sweet air on a road leading

To another road, then another one, widening

To a motorway with four lanes, ending in

A new town on the edge of a city