Eavan Boland's new collection mines a strong American seam, but she will forever be an Irish poet, she tells Belinda McKeon

'It was winter, lunar, wet," begins the title poem of Eavan Boland's new collection, Domestic Violence. It seems an instantly recognisable opening to a Boland poem.

It was "winter, lunar, wet"; it was also almost 40 years ago, and a terrible time in Ireland, and a strange, raw time in the life of a young couple in a new house in the Dublin suburbs. Boland, the master of the lyric poem which is at once intensely thrilling and quietly devastating, which always seems to root its reader to the spot, returns in her new collection to the trials and tensions that have long haunted her poetry. They have consistently been at her poetry's centre, but they have never - because they are so deep, so fiercely scored into the complicated sense of Irish identity she explores in her work - worn out their welcome, never exhausted their worth.

History and responsibility, myth and meaning, the privacies of motherhood and womanhood, the pressures of the world pressing up against the kitchen window, and the seeming chasms between those things; it is familiar ground for Boland, but in her 10th collection this ground is freshly, unflinchingly disturbed.

"I think that you always do have a central preoccupation in writing poetry," Boland says. She is 63, with soft, dark hair and eyes that flash with reaction and knowledge. "Writing poems, for me, is a bit like mining a seam of rock. One day you get some silver, and the next day you get just rock. But it's your piece of rock and it doesn't much change. You just get better at mining it, that's all. And so I do think of myself as having those preoccupations and going back to them, over and over."

For more than a decade, Boland's time has been spent mostly in the United States. At Stanford, she is professor in Humanities and director of the Creative Writing programme, and director of that programme's highly prestigious Stegner Fellowship. Despite living abroad for such a long time, she says she is still fundamentally an Irish poet. "I never will be anything else," she says. "I lived away when I was a child, I lived in America for three years [ her father, an ambassador, was posted to the UN General Assembly in 1956]. I divide my time between Stanford and Dublin, and I come back to Dublin every 10 weeks, so I don't lose contact that way."

HOWEVER, SHE'S deeply interested, at the same time, in life in today's United States, she says. She's interested in the "conversations" which she sees to be happening there. And not just in poetry, of course - although being in the US, she says, gives her a through-line to "broader conversations" about poetry, to the exchange over "borders and boundaries", between different coasts - but also in politics, for Boland has been, from the beginning, a markedly political poet. And if the title poem of Domestic Violenceaddresses the guilt and the difficulty of building a private life, of building a family in a country which had just "broke[ n] out its sores for all to see", in a house whose little television gave out "grey and greyer tears / and killings, killings, killings,/ and moonlight-coloured funerals", then a poet who lives in the US today, who grapples every day with questions of the poetic and the political, must have things, indeed, to say about the relationship of domesticity to violence, about the tension between home ground and the distant echo of a terrible war.

And Boland does have things to say - but through her poetry, as the new volume shows, and never with a loudspeaker, never in a preaching or overt way. "When people came here in the 1970s and spoke about Ireland and about what Ireland needed to do, I was often offended," she says. "And I made up my mind that I would never go to another country, any other country, and tell them what to think or do or say about their own lives." She listens "very sympathetically" to American conversations, she says, and is "often enlightened" by them.

"It's not a stretch for me. I love America. I was a child there. And I wish it well. There is nothing that outsiders can do but listen to this conversation of change in America, which is much more rigorous than a lot of outsiders in Europe see it as being, much more heartfelt, anguished and self-challenging than it is given credit for."

The "anguish" of being a poet in America now is one with which Boland certainly must see her students struggling. She clearly adores teaching - "I have always been a teaching poet. I always want to go into a classroom" - and talks of her undergraduates and her Stegner fellows with genuine respect and pride. She loves the moment, when teaching a poem, "when the poem ceases to be yours and becomes theirs". That is what happened to her with poetry in her early life, and with great teachers, she says, and it is satisfying to watch it make a difference in the lives of her students.

Teaching, essay-writing and editing are endeavours which quicken her "archaeological interest in poetry", she says; she is fascinated by "the origins of things". She has edited, with Ed Hirsch, a new anthology on the sonnet, which will be published later this year, but she smiles at the suggestion that the long immersion in the sonnet form which the book must have required might influence her own poetry in any formal way. "No, I'm not a sonneteer at all. I'm not a closed-form person. There will be no theory leading to practice on this one."

When it comes to poetic form, Boland has long been something of a boat-rocker. She has "intellectual questions" about most established forms, she says - about a "hierarchical" form such as elegy, for example. "I have been a poet who has been in some kind of dissident relationship since I was very young to the tradition and the structures of poetry," she admits. "I mean, if there's any difference, it's just that in getting older, I've felt freer to question it than I did when I was younger. When you're a young poet, you simply don't know what right you have to question things. When you're an old poet, you feel that it's your duty to question them."

And question she does. She questions WB Yeats, and the "shibboleths" of the revival poetry he created, and his patronising treatment of rural Ireland and of the rural poet. This is despite the fact that Yeats is, "without a shadow", the most important of poets for her: "The bringing of a really high lyric agenda to an increasing sense of powerlessness is one of the great artistic models of this or any time," she says.

She questions Patrick Kavanagh, and the exclusionary nature of the literary scene over which he presided, even though Kavanagh was her hero for his intelligent understanding of the parochial (as opposed to the provincial), and for his "mighty leap" out of Yeats's shibboleth, which showed her, "as a woman and as a poet", that she was "not bound by the pre-existing patterns, however set in stone they were".

She questions poetic form and the publishing business - whereas she was lucky enough to make her heroes from "the durable, the dissident, the powerful presences like Kavanagh and Clarke", young writers now are smothered by "this toxic environment of celebrity writing". And she questions the nature of critique in and about literature today; to be vigilant, to be mindful of who and what is being excluded by a literary movement or a literary tradition, she says, a literature cannot work off the critique which applied to a previous situation.

"You can't be nostalgic for the grandeur of a previous moment. You really need to look at the moment and fashion the critique for the moment you're in. Otherwise you'll get a time lag; you'll end up not understanding the moment you're in." It's writers themselves who must make this critique, she says.

Boland herself created her critique, with her 1995 prose narrative Object Lessons, in which she reflects deeply and memorably on the relationship, for the poet, between womanhood and nationhood. "A lot of writers will say to you, well, I just want to write, and I respect that," Boland says, "but I think the danger of that is that their writing will be located in someone else's critique. I want to hear the process by which they're thinking." That process can come across, she says, through interview, through articles, through readings, through comments. "I want to know how to find their work in that process, and how they find their work in it."

The process through which Boland has found Domestic Violenceis one in which she has been engaged for decades. The book comes from her suspicion of the cult of the sublime as the only fit subject for poetry, from her belief in the crucial importance and validity for poetry of the domestic, of the interior, of the apparently mundane, and from her anger at the way the "domestic poem" has been disparaged by the tradition as trivial, as "womanly", as a second-class citizen. In this month's American Poetry Review, Boland writes about how three poems - Charlotte Mew's Rooms, Thomas Kinsella's Another September, and Else Lasker-Schüler's My Blue Piano- gave her encouragement as a young poet, gave her, with their unembarrassed concentration on the interior, grist for her own poetic and critical mill. They taught her, she says, "to speak the vernacular of an ordinary life . . . to say the words love and vision in plain speech."

IN A PALPABLE way, the new collection comes from a process that has been going on, not just since the beginning of Boland's career, but since her childhood. Her mother was a painter, and painters, says Boland, "got there long before poets" where the vitality and the power of the domestic interior is concerned. "You will look at many interiors by painters, and they are studies in disquiet. Studies in the malaise of what is not there, what's missing, what echoes in spaces. I'm interested in that."

She knew she had a new collection, she says, when she wrote a poem about the artist Michael Harnett, a still-life painter who left Clonakilty for Philadelphia during the famine, and whose image is on the cover of the US edition of Domestic Violence. Harnett painted simple objects, but "very eerie objects - violins, fruit, tin whistles, letters, notes". And in them all was an echo of the place from which he had come. "It so struck me that this man came from the cauldron of history," says Boland, "and wanted to paint an enclosed meaning into these surfaces. He was a noted realist painter, but there is this sense, in those objects, of everything that had been lost. And somehow, for me, that's where the book was going. The way that the object, the interior, is this cipher for all that goes into it and all that can be hidden by it."

Domestic Violence, by Eavan Boland, is published by Carcanet, €13. Eavan Boland one of several poets in a reading tonight in the Dublin Unitarian Church, 112 St Stephen's Green. Free, but booking is essential. Contact Poetry Ireland at 01-4789974 or e-mail management@poetryireland.ie

Poetic justice Eavan Boland on . . .

WB Yeats

'The bringing of a really high lyric agenda to an increasing sense of powerlessness is one of the great artistic models of this or any time'

Writing poetry

'Writing poems is like mining a seam of rock. One day you get some silver, and the next day you get just rock. But it's your piece of rock and it doesn't much change. You just get better at mining it. I think of myself as having those preoccupations'

Patrick Kavanagh

He showed her she was 'not bound by the pre-existing patterns, however set in stone they were'

Painting

'Many interiors by painters are studies in disquiet. Studies in the malaise of what is not there, what's missing, what echoes in spaces. I'm interested in that'

The publishing business

Whereas Boland was lucky enough to make her heroes from 'the durable, the dissident, the powerful presences like Kavanagh and Clarke', young writers now are smothered by 'this toxic environment of celebrity writing'