An ultimately lackluster testimony to the truism that art and life
can't be separated. One of Ireland's major poets, Boland (In a Time
of Violence, 1994, not reviewed) uses personal experience to
illustrate a straightforward argument on the poetic life. In the
male poetry of the past, she states, the feminine was always muse,
nymph, and symbol; by being elevated, woman was reduced to a silent
object, with no individual personality or voice. By writing poetry,
she argues, women reclaim their own subjectivity and turn the
poetic tradition of Britain and Ireland on its head. Female poets
then assume the responsibility of reexamining and reworking the
traditional relationship between subject and object. To highlight
this theme, Boland traces her own growing unease with the seeming
discord between her life as a suburban housewife and the one about
which she, as a self-identifying political Irish poet, was supposed
to write. Unfortunately, the technique used does not do justice to
the basic premise. Despite a keen eye for image, Boland's
rhetorical style is extremely heavy-handed. She sets out to unwind
her argument and story as she would a poem, returning to the same
images more than once, until, she states, the argument "loses its
reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence." Her
narrative is repetitious without revealing a new idea or nuance
each time, and the majority of her images, although sometimes
symbolically potent on their own, are raised and then quickly
dropped. The few images she does return to - such as the table
where she spent hours as a young woman trying to become a writer or
the suburbs where she later lives - don't have the same power as
the ones she never fully explores. As a short essay on poetic
theory this might have been effective; as a full-length memoir it
fails to move. (Kirkus Reviews)
Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these
lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the
historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the
other.
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