Poetry:Forty years after her first book, New Territory, was published, Eavan Boland's work continues to deepen in both humanity and complexity. This is the more remarkable since her highly-articulated ars poetica has already remapped the territory of contemporary poetry. But Domestic Violence does just what its title implies; breaking apart the certainties of those very domestic interiors which Boland has famously made her own.
In part this is because her "Domestic Violence" is as much the bitterness of 20th-century Irish history as it is the intimate failures of a couple: "nothing is ever entirely/ right in the lives of those who love each other". A sophisticated semantic enjambment (the Irish nation, Boland suggests, is characterised by such bloody love) creates collective resonance. That resonance is explicit in the book's closing section, Becoming the Hand of John Speed, named for "the agile mapping hand of John Speed/ making The Kingdome of Ireland, 1612". Ten poems - all but one in Boland's characteristic first person - situate the poet, or rather her poetic attention, in specific historical spaces from which to "map" the country.
In the first of these, Atlantis, a 14-line poem - punningly subtitled A Lost Sonnet - suggests a culture of drowning one's sorrows might be a remedy for that ancient longing the Welsh call hiraeth. Yet the piece is also a lament for a personal lost youth: "I miss our old city -//white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting/ under fanlights and low skies to go home in it". Fine characterisation aside, the sheer poetic delight of these lines is that wilful category error - one cannot be "under" fanlights and skies in the same way, since fanlights are not horizontal - which snags the attention. Boland is a knowing, witty poet, whose every allusion is advertent. Formation, for example - "In the distance I can hear the Kish lighthouse -/ a phrase from the coast, saying salt water, saying danger" - echoes TS Eliot's "Fear death by drowning", from his own urban lament, The Wasteland; and Boland makes her understanding of the power of literary tradition explicit in The Nineteenth-Century Irish Poets, whom she sees as "poisoned", and poisoning, by repression: "Now I see what they left us. The toxic lyric.// The poem for which there is no antidote".
Still, as the sheer pragmatism of such an image of poison and antidote suggests, the in-every-sense interior world we associate with Eavan Boland is never far away. The title poem of the book's third section, Indoors, owns: "I have always wanted a world that is cured of the outdoors". Yet that "pastoral of inland elements" is subtly disrupted here. If the Boland of 1990's key collection, Outside History, adopted a poetics of naming, in which a piece of antique jewellery, a linen cupboard, work as touchstones, Domestic Violence emerges - beautifully - into a poetics of seeing. The book is coloured from its first lines by all that is "winter, lunar, wet. At dusk/ pewter seedlings became moonlit orphans".
This single finely observed line introduces us to Boland the colourist. Elsewhere, there are "rooms where skirts appear steeped in tea"; spring air "tinged with a colour close to vinegar,/ sure sign of rain"; "slate-blue moonlight"; silk "showing/ the gloomy colour pewter becomes/ by candlelight"; "bronze-green perch in a mute river". Everything is subtle, muted as "an Irish sky" - or as the claustrophobic chiaroscuro in which history appears. As Irish Interior says, "There is always this: a background, a foreground".
And, while these images are vividly sensed, they are also, and in every sense, haunting. For the young Heaney, poetry was "Digging"; for the mature Boland it is archaeology: "not a science but/ an art of memory". In Wisdom, the buried past is resurrected: "pushing its surface back into the world,/ lifting it clear of its first funeral". Characteristically, this imagery stuns with intellectual as well as sensory clarity; its evocation of physical revelation is underpinned by religious comprehension. The world Boland here explores still further is not only palpable, but structured by a deep understanding of its own mysteriousness. She is our pre-eminent poet of experience, evoking that strange nexus where thought, feeling and sense all struggle to contain both the everyday and its extraordinary connotations. In Domestic Violence, she shows us once again the rare contingency of our world and all that we invest in it.
Fiona Sampson's Common Prayer is published by Carcanet in June. She is the editor of Poetry Review
Domestic Violence By Eavan Boland Carcanet, 56pp. £8.95