Eavan Boland’s “The Wife’s Lament”, a translation from the Anglo-Saxon, begins: “I sing this poem full of grief. / Full of sorrow about my life / Ready to say the cruel state / I have endured, early of late.” It is a splendid performance, full of chancy verbal energy and rich historical witnessing. It’s also quite uncharacteristic of A Woman Without a Country, not in its subject matter, but in its ready embrace of rhyme and regular metre. Where themes of history and loss are concerned, Boland more usually inclines to the jagged and the elliptical, and this collection is no exception.
The book is about loss and, to paraphrase Robert Hass, in this it resembles all other Boland books. In the typical Boland poem, it is always late in the day, literally and historically; the heroes and villains of history have fled the scene; and their victims have been arranged into decorative postures of melancholy rebuke. The details of history are sketched in a kind of knowing shorthand: “1890. Empire, attitude. / A rainy afternoon in Dublin” (“Edge of Empire”). Neglected lives are juxtaposed with the overweening narratives of empire and nation state: “My grandmother lived outside history. And she died there” (“Sea Change”). “Did she find her nation?” Boland asks of her grandmother, adding: “And does it matter?” The frequent questioning in Boland’s work over the last four or more decades, and the continuing shortage of answers, suggest a challenge that is it not just difficult but well-nigh impossible.
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