TalkBack: Eavan Boland, Becoming Anne Bradstreet (2012)

TALKBACK

Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland (b. 1944) spent the first six years of her life in Dublin, moving to London when her father was appointed Irish ambassador and then to New York when he was appointed president of the UN General Assembly. Boland returned to Dublin for college, earning a BA in English and Latin from Trinity College Dublin. She has taught at Stanford University since 1996. Boland established her reputation with her collection In Her Own Image (1980) and has published regularly since then. She is a feminist and a poet but, she maintains, not a feminist poet. She sees a fundamental difference between the “ethic” of feminism and the “aesthetic” of poetry, arguing that feminism is a definite moral position, whereas poetry, like all art, begins where certainty ends.

Becoming Anne Bradstreet

Boland wrote the following poem for a chapbook called Shakespeare’s Sisters, a series of poems by contemporary poets commissioned to complement the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2012 exhibit Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500–1700.

It happens again

As soon as I take down her book and open it.

I turn the page.

My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.

5

The ship’s rail freezes.

Mare Hibernicum1 leads to Anne Bradstreet’s coast.

A blackbird leaves her pine trees

And lands in my spruce trees.

I open my door on a Dublin street.

10

Her child/her words are staring up at me:

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save home-spun cloth, i’ th’ house I find.

We say home truths

Because her words can be at home anywhere—

15

At the source, at the end and whenever

The book lies open and I am again

An Irish poet watching an English woman

Become an American poet.

(2012)