ESSAYS: CAITRÍONA O'REILLYreviews A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman PoetBy Eavan Boland Carcanet Press, 265pp. £16.95

'THIS IS NOT a scholarly book," Eavan Boland writes in the preface to A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet."I did not approach my subject by finding facts. I approached it by finding myself."

For Boland, the appropriate "unit of measurement" when approaching the history of poetry is "the measure of own life". Readers familiar with Boland's work will recognise this angle of approach. She has consistently sought, in essays that are supplemental to, and in many respects justifications of, her poetry, to define and redefine her ars poeticabroadly in light of her gender and nationality, and, conversely, to view personal and political concerns through the lens of her poetics.

It would appear that there is little fresh or different to be expected from this collection. In the title essay, however, Boland proposes a newer version of her old self, one caught between seemingly exclusive alternatives from which she felt “a pressure to choose. Between the formal stanza and the open one. Between the canon and the tradition. Between modernism and what went before. Between the public poem and the private one.”

Boland's "argument" and "advocacy" in this book are "that we can hold in poise oppositional concepts – I have put them forward here as Iand we, as just one version of a possible opposition, but there are many others – without needing to erase one with the other". This conclusion, redolent of watered-down lit crit, is for the most part not borne out by the essays that follow.

One of the main problems with Boland’s approach is its basic ahistoricity, of which she betrays an occasional and telling awareness, as when she writes that “the danger of describing it lies in the risk of giving it a coherence the process never had”. Her continual, even compulsive, revision of the past, and in particular of her personal prehistory, inevitably runs the risk of false witness and intellectual fuzziness. A skeleton outline of the old feminist shibboleth that the personal is the political is recognisable here. Boland would doubtless argue that to refract ideas about literary history, national identity, authorship and authority through one woman’s sense of her own artistic development is an entirely ethical and valid approach. But it also has the effect of deflecting possible criticism by queering the pitch with prefabricated ad hominem (or in this case ad feminam) statement. The critic is wrong-footed: given that Boland has declared that her approach is self- rather than fact-based, what critic can feel comfortable about contending directly with Boland’s narratives of her own poetic development and the necessarily partial version of literary history propounded through those narratives? The precise validity of this method is open to debate.

This collection proceeds via three sections: Journeys, which is most concerned with the processes of poetic "being" and "becoming"; Maps, which contains essays on some of the women poets who provided inspiration and guidance; and Destinations, with its concluding essay, Letter to a Young Woman Poet. The volume thus describes an arc through tentative beginnings ("these are not easy matters to explain. They are fragmentary, lost in a mercurial past"), through instances of readerly and writerly comradeship, to a point where Boland has, presumably, "arrived": "I could tell you that I am a woman past middle age, writing this on a close summer night in Ireland."

Significantly, these essays convince most when Boland momentarily slips the toils of the self and reaches out to her forebears and contemporaries. Her account of translating the German poet Elisabeth Langgässer is compelling, while her reading of the German-Jewish writer Else Lasker-Schüler is empathetic and illuminating. Such moments are rarer than they could be, however. Boland’s habit of continually checking her pulse by subsuming all threads into her narrative of personal witness becomes, by its very insistence, a distraction.

Boland’s prose style lends itself to easy parody, as in: “It is the late 1970s. I am up at 7am. I have small children. The morning is chilly . . .” More seriously, the familiar rhythms, images and what might be termed her writing’s atmospherics, while attractive, can mask a troubling intellectual vagueness.

This is most apparent in Letter to a Young Woman Poet. The narrative oscillates back and forth between an imagined room that is the setting for an encounter with the young poet of the title, Boland's fictive inheritrix, and Boland's account of her own poetic self-discovery. There is much delicate scene-setting: "stay with the fiction," she exhorts. "Imagine the light is less. That we can no longer see the water drops and wasps under the fuchsia."

The essay recounts an epiphany in the life of the young Boland, entering what her older self now terms “the erotics of history” while walking on O’Connell Street past statues of “Burke. Grattan. O’Connell. Parnell”. Precisely what this “erotics” consists of, beyond the vagueness of “my skin, my flesh, my sex . . . stood as a subversive historian, ready to edit the text”, is not precisely detailed. At this point the narrative deftly swerves back to Boland’s fictional interlocutor: “if you and I were really there in that room with the air darkening around us, this would be a good place to stop. To be quiet for a moment.” Perhaps not good, a reader might argue, but definitely convenient. This is rhetorical sleight of hand rather than solid and convincing argument.

Similarly, Boland's lifelong preoccupation with questions of authority, permission and the intellectual autonomy of the woman poet make her gestures towards posterity in this essay and elsewhere in this collection seem surprisingly, contradictorily prescriptive: "If women go to the poetic past as I believe they should[my emphasis], if they engage responsibly with it and struggle to change it . . . then they will have the rightto influence what is handed on in poetry."

In the end these essays, as much by their questionable methods as their content, engender many more doubts than they are prepared to satisfy.

Caitríona O'Reilly is a poet . Her most recent collection, The Sea Cabinet, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2006