A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

by Eavan Boland

An eloquent series of linked essays about the poetic enterprise from "one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century" ( Poetry Review ). "This is a book of being and becoming. It is about being a poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one," writes Eavan Boland. These inspiring essays are both critical and deeply personal, allowing the adventure, passion, and struggle of becoming a woman poet to be viewed from different perspectives. Boland traces her own experiences as a woman, wife, and mother and their effects on her poetry. In the opening essay, she explores the story of her mother, a painter, and her influence on Boland's own concepts of art and womanhood. She examines the work of women poets such as Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath, whose poetry provided light and guidance for her own work. And finally, in "Letter to a Young Woman Poet," she addresses an unseen young poet of the future, and looks to a world where this future artist can change the poetic past as well as the present.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Writing, Memoir, Irish Literature, Biography Memoir

274 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). Her poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She was married to the novelist Kevin Casey.

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was such a challenge for me. Eavan Boland is one of the poets I studied when I was doing my MA in Irish studies. I've only read one of her books of poetry, The Bronze Serpent, plus various poems I've stumbled across on the internet.
This book is a series of essays, many previously published elsewhere. It's not exactly a memoir, though parts of it are about her life and her journey-- the focus throughout is on her inner journey as a poet.

I'm a woman and a poet, but my worldview and concerns are so very different from hers. A gulf separates us broader than the Atlantic ocean. She's 30 years older than I am and she's Irish whereas I'm American. And my life growing up in Texas in the 70s and 80s is very different than her life growing up as the child of an Irish diplomat in the 40s and 50s. But it's more than just the distances of time and space. Maybe partly it's personality, but I think there's something more.

Her poetry is very concerned with Irish identity and public life and her book is very concerned with how she as a woman poet made a place for herself in a poetic tradition which didn't really seem to have a place for a woman. There are so many tensions she experiences which are just foreign to me. I grew up with so many female poets on my radar. And I've noticed that poetry in Ireland has a much more civic dimension and that poetry is much more part of Irish public life. Poets seem to matter much more in Irish consciousness than they do in the US. And she is also much more concerned with feminist thought in general-- with women's history and women's place in history and in the literary tradition.

Her essays are fascinating, but I often feel like I'm threading my way through a cave with only a dim candle, barely able to make out the features she's trying to get me to notice. She assumes a lot of knowledge, understanding, points of view. It feels like I've just walked into a room and she's continuing a conversation that I'm completely unaware of and am trying to piece together what was said before I came in, but I just don't have enough information. And yet that very feature makes this book compelling to me.

I'm still not entirely sure I understand he controlling image of the two maps. What are these maps and how do they help her to make sense of her world, both inner and outer? I don't think I quite grasp it. Is one map her personal past and the other map the poetic tradition? Is one map her personal past and the other the work of the female poets she didn't discover until later, after she'd already been formed by an exclusively male tradition? She never quite comes out and says what the two maps are and no matter how many times I re-read the section in which she introduces the idea, I still feel befuddled. Maybe I'm just a poor reader? Maybe she's being intentionally obscure? But it doesn't seem like she thinks she's being obscure. It seems like she thinks she's being crystal clear and therefore it feels to me that I am failing as a reader. Is it her failure or mine? Or is it not a failure at all, but a deliberate confusion? I kept reading the book hoping for an answer, and at the end I'm not less confused but more. And yet I want to keep re-reading until it makes sense to me.

"This is a book about being and becoming. It is about being a poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one. If these seem in the wrong order there is a reason: the disorder is part of my subject. There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about. For that reason, this is not a scholarly book. I did not approach my subject by finding facts. I approached it by finding myself."

There is something almost mystical in the way Boland discusses poetry. And yet not at all mystical. It feels often vague and amorphous and constantly shifting. But she doesn't seem very concerned at all with faith and belief, religion and mysticism-- except inasmuch as it's impossible to completely separate Irish identity from religion. But faith isn't one of Boland's poetic concerns. Yet when she talks about poetry I often feel like I do when listening to someone talk about faith who is completely outside my own faith tradition. It's not just a matter of vocabulary and terms, it's also about a completely alien worldview. And yet it seems like Boland's worldview shouldn't be so alien. I've been a student of Irish literature for two decades. I am a woman and I've been a poet much of my life. So why does she feel so strange and unsettling? Perhaps this is why I found the book so absorbing: trying to enter into her mind, her world, herself and to see and understand a person who is so completely unlike myself.

Boland writes: "The first women poets I found were from other countries. Their work filled up the silences that troubled me at home.... To mark my early discoveries, most of the poems here are not Irish. But I never forgot in reading them-- not for one moment-- that I was. I make it plain that I understood these texts again and again through my Irishness. They were most often observed through the lens of my life as a woman and poet in a small country most of their authors had never seen: and yet they helped live it."

I'm not Irish and maybe I'd have to be Irish to really understand where Boland is coming from. But I want to understand because it feels important.

[Madhubrata · Rating 4 out of 5]

She is so good.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eavan Boland writes with an admirable authority of tone. Though her essays are reflective, she does not couch her conclusions with uncertainties: through much thought, she has reached a conclusion that she wants to share with her reader. This authority feels particularly remarkable in a woman writer: men allow themselves to speak from a position of authority, whether earned or not; women, even very accomplished ones like Boland, often address the reader from a place of ambiguity. There is room for ambiguity in writing, but there is also something very compelling about Boland's frank, definite tone. She invites argument -- this reader felt like she could have sat down and had a constructive disagreement with her, but only after she has researched and thought as long and hard as Boland has.

Divided into two sections, the "two maps" of the title, the book deals with Boland's journey to becoming a poet, and with women writers who have pointed her on her way. The first section includes some details of autobiography, but it's not a memoir -- the essays are constructed around the central questions or conundrums of Boland's writing life, while looking back at the canon of poetry as it was presented in the 60s and 70s. Though women has been writing poetry for centuries, the canon didn't reflect this, and Boland questioned the subjects which men wrote about, and how they reflected or did not reflect her own life. She asks about what poetry does, what the lyric poem is, and how poetry reflects the interior of the mind and of the household. The second section is less personal: she writes about women poets she has admired or who have guided on her way to becoming a poet. Some of these are excellent -- her writing on Charlotte Mew immediately sent me in search of more of Mew's work -- and some are a little too short, or lack nuance, such as her reflections on Gwendolyn Brookes.

The book concludes with a "Letter to a Young Woman Poet", in the style of Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet". It is moving and evocative. It's wonderful and inspiring to read Boland's essays: she is an excellent writer of criticism as well as an important poet.

[Avryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the final essay of this collection, entitled “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” Boland writes:

“You cannot see it, although your presence shapes what I am saying. And so in the last light, at the end of the day, what matters is language. Is the unspoken at the edge of the spoken. And so I have made a fiction to sustain what is already a fiction: this talking across time and space” (250).

This collection of essays is a beautiful tribute to women’s contribution to literature which acknowledges, but also traverses, the material boarders of time and space.

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays forms an interesting companion to this Irish woman poet's body of poetry. Again and again Boland returns to her memory of being a young wife and mother in a new suburb outside of Dublin in the 1970s, when violence in the North unsettled life in the South. "Domestic Violence," which ends the first section of biographical essays, records especially succinctly Boland's forceful attempt to subvert the received poetic tradition in order to make room for, and give significance to, the domestic poem.

The second section titled "Maps" consists of critical pieces on women poets who gave her help and direction in questioning the tradition that she loves. There are essays here on Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Plath, Edna St, Vincent Millay, Denise Levertov, Anne Bradstreet, Gwendolyn Brooks and Paula Meehan. The most illuminating essay is on Bradstreet. Boland shows how the contemporary of Marvell and Milton wrote herself into a Puritan New Englander. There are few surprises in the other pieces, though the judgments are always sympathetic and persuasive. The writing is sometimes more obscure than necessary, but the obscurity is partly a result of desiring to be suggestive, not definitive.

The last section is made up of a single essay, a letter to an imaginary Young Woman Poet, in a conscious nod to Rilke. The letter exhorts the young poet to change the tradition, and not to change or curb herself to fit the tradition. As is the case in such missives, the letter-writer is writing mostly to her younger self. The final figure of friendship between generations is deeply humane and democratic.

Throughout the book Boland strives to recover the context of a poet's life in order to read the poet's text more deeply. It is an approach that runs counter to Pound's strictures against biographical criticism, also adopted by the New Critics. For Boland, however, the life is bigger than the poem, and too much is lost when the life is disregarded. This book provides Boland's life to go with her poetry.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

It felt good to read this book, as if I were in good company. I wish I had maintained my leisurely pace, but instead of reading an essay a random evening, I had a marathon at the end, trying to prepare for a reading schedule I've set out for myself this fall, and thus, the redundancies (feeling alone as a female Irish poet, difficulties finding American poets' work in bookshops, etc.) wore on me rather than helped me maintain a thread. I'd recommend this book to anyone in my circumstances--I'm a bit bewildered after an MFA, after attending several workshops and conferences and am now trying to put myself into a firm poetic self and place. Her discussion of the domestic and the ways in which one can look into or out of said poems were particularly helpful for me, who always feels that nervous "poetess" legacy she mentions so well.

[Janice Wilson Stridick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rich, intelligent discussion of the many dichotomies we all face, but especially women who wish to create work of depth and value. Many times I found lines to keep, savor, that sum up quandaries I've mulled over -- Boland provides a welcome perspective. She sheds much light on female authority and how to win it, winnow it, savor it. I loved reading these essays, and recommend them highly.

[Elizabeth Shafer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A subtle and insightful description of Boland's personal and poetic conflicts in her long journey caught between historical patriarchal traditions and her lyric feminist voice as she was influenced by women poets, and her recognition that both 'maps' inform her work and are essential to it.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

From beginning, I expected this book to be a memoir. While the first paragraph opened the door to Boland’s mind, I felt I was tapping into the collective spirit of women poets:

“This is a book of being and becoming. It is about being a
poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one. If
these seem in the wrong order there is a reason: the disor-
der is part of my subject….The becoming doesn’t stop
because the being has been achieved. They proceed together….”

Boland was definitely tapping into my own hesitant and exploratory forays into the poetry world. It also made sense to me that the long-held male dominance over opportunity, career choices, being allowed to speak for ourselves, etc., naturally made women cautious. “Can I do this? Must I copy the styles and themes that men embrace?” (My words, not Boland’s.)

Before the end of the first chapter, I knew that this was not a straightforward memoir. It’s a collection of essays. Most are about women poets of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. She covered their strength, perseverance against great odds, ups and downs, and how they shaped the poetry world as we know it today. I especially relished her insistance that living female poets step back in time (in an analytical, illuminating way) to celebrate how much those first pioneers accomplished as well as getting the world of avid readers to think differently about a past where women had little say.

[Cindy Brookshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A visiting writer let me borrow this book, even though she hadn't finished it herself and was eager to do so. Her sacrifice made this an ideal National Poetry Month read for me. Not only did I enjoy learning about Evan Boland ("Quarantine"), but also the poets she held in regard, like Adrienne Rich ("Apology"), Elizabeth Bishop ("The Moose") and Charlotte Mew ("The Farmer's Bride"). Boland's final chapter, "Letter to a Young Woman Poet" spoke to me. I remember those long child-bearing/child-rearing/office-working years when my own creative writing was a secret thrill. Boland describes her own fascination when "the boundaries between the edges of a poem and the limits of the world began at times to dissolve" between her words in her notebook and "a child's cry at its perimeter and the bitterness of peat smoke at its further edge."

[Xenia Tran · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel enchanted by this book. The spell has the characteristics of great upper division or grad school classes I've taken where I feel completely in sync with the themes and am inspired by the material, and a sense that I am intoxicated as I begin to apprehend Boland's aesthetic.

I don't know much of any of the poetry Boland examines in these essays. I know about some of the poets, but am really underprepared for the specifics of any interpretation of their works. This allows me to be easily led by the author to understand what she values in them and how they contribute greatly and essentially to both the canons of Poetry and Women's Poetry.

Each essay shines a light on both Boland's view of how poetry matters and how the poet matters to the history of poetic voice, form and style. It's a pretty complicated argument, and I get a strong buzz as I consider how each essay contributes to and complicates this or that theme as I complete them.

[Emma Lawson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eavan Boland is an amazing poet. And there are some interesting insights here but there's also repetition and an insistence on the personal which doesn't expand out into anything that I can get hold of. The reclaiming of the personal, and the domestic, as valid poetic subjects is an important point. But I didn't really feel it evolved through the book. I've probably missed something here. After all, collections like In A Time Of Violence are truly groundbreaking.

[Vhicy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the book; related more to the criticism essays of other woman poets rather than the first part of the book, which described the writer's youth in Ireland. Appreciated the argument about bombastic Romantics overshadowing our own 'less compelling' lives and narratives, and was encouraged by the writer's urging to make our (woman) experiences worthy of poetry, as well.

[Lanora · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two parts to this book. One is a memoir of Eavan Boland's journey to becoming a poet. The other is an re-evaluation of a variety of women poets. Both are fascinating reads and made me nostalgic for the luxury of being a student of literature.

[Alisa Books and Sequins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fascinated by how she unearthed her own development as a poet, and I loved how she wrote with so much feeling about the books and poets that meant so much to her. Plus she is just a beautiful writer and many of her sentences and turns of phrase are simply pure pleasure to read.

[Jes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have SUCH an intensely visceral response to Eavan Boland's prose. Her style and her preoccupations resonate with me so strongly that I always end up writing out pages and pages of her books by hand, just to feel closer to those flawless, flawless sentences. God, what a writer.

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boland is brilliant, and she has a wonderful way of mixing the personal, the political, and the literary into a coherent theory, but I wasn't able to connect emotionally with her essays in the way that I was hoping to.

[Antonia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to like this better than I did. Kept feeling as though I should like it better.

Like new hardcover. Will send to the first person who asks.

[Marcela · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for any aspiring poet.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

some good stuff in here. the essays are written quite plainly, they nearly seem like blog entries. i get cranky with essay collections that aren't edited to account for repetitions, i have to admit.