moira
Administrator
member is offline
Joined: Apr 2008
Gender: Female 
Posts: 534
Karma: 3 |  | Eavan Boland
« Thread Started on Sept 3, 2008, 4:59pm » | |
EAVAN BOLAND’S “LIMITS”
by Joyce Nower
(The following is one of four revised excerpts from a three-part article on Irish poetry published in my column “Intersections” in The Alsop Review.
The four excerpts include poems by Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala NÍ Dhomhnaill, and Medbh McGuckian, all four born in the Forties and Fifties of the last century. Further poems by these poets may be found in Contemporary Irish Poetry, Ed. Anthony Bradley, University of California Press, 1988; and Modern Irish Poetry, Ed. Patrick Crotty, The Blackstaff Press Limited, Northern Ireland, 2001.)
One of the qualities I admire in Irish poets is their passionate intimacy with their country: a sense of its history - pagan, as well as Christian and contemporary. Eavan Boland illustrates this passion in her poem “Limits” (Code, Carcanet Press, 2001). It is about The Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the four Christian gospels, probably brought to Kells in Ireland by refugee Scottish monks in 806 A.D. to protect it from Viking raids. The book, which I saw when I was in Dublin in 2004, is on view in a temperature-controlled room at Trinity College, where the curator turns a page every day. Boland’s poem is, in size, similar to one of the elaborate initial letters drawn in the book. Observe the metaphoric exactitude of the description, a description which conjures the rapacity of the invaders in the letter drawings of the monks. The bejeweled cover of the book, by the way, did not withstand the invasions: sacred objects have a pull on secular greed.
Eavan Boland (1952-) was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and has taught in Dublin and universities in the United States. Born into a diplomat’s family, she and her family were stationed in England for many years (where she experienced English prejudice against the Irish), and later in New York, where her father represented Ireland at the United Nations. Today she lives in Dublin with novelist husband Kevin Casey and her daughters. A founder of a women’s press, Arlen House, she has given opportunities to many younger women writers. Extensive information on her books and her many honors can be found online.
Limits
by Eavan Boland
So high
in their leafy silence
over Kells, over Durrow
as the Vikings
raged south –
the old monks
made the alphabet
wild:
they dipped iron
into azure and
indigo: they gave strange
wings to their o’s
and e’s: their vowels
clung on with
talons and the thin,
ribbed wolves
which had gone north
left their frozen winters
and were lured back
to their consonants.
![[image]](http://shayepoet.com/conference/authors/irelandslide2.jpg "[image]")
| |
|
![[Search This Thread]](http://images.proboards.com/search2.gif "[Search This Thread]")
![[Share Topic]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/share.png "[Share Topic]")
![[Print]](http://images.proboards.com/buttons/print.gif "[Print]")
Author
Logged