Surviving the swans

Poetry: Reading Eavan Boland's powerful oeuvre in the New Collected Poems, one is immediately struck by the idea that persistent moral courage is a powerful technical advantage in a poet's work. Moral courage rearranges ideas around itself like a determined child dragging a blanket full of toys, clothes and food.

It is typical of Boland's courage that she has opened her New Collected with an in-your-face provocation: "I have retrieved two poems from 23 Poems, a chapbook which came out in 1962 when I was eighteen." Unlike our politicians and terrorists, she has removed all camouflage from every previous position. We now see the process of Eavan Boland's work in all its awkward clarity. This awkwardness includes those diabolical creatures of Kavanagh and Yeats-saturated Dublin in the 1960s - swans and refrains:

What is astonishing about Eavan Boland and the august generation who surround her - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Derek Mahon, Eamon Grennan, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley - is that they survived the intensity of that post-War obsession with the Olympians of the Celtic Twilight. The strategies they developed to escape from Yeats are as interesting and complex as the Celtic Twilight itself. In many ways, Boland, cosmopolitan, well-connected, brilliant, was most likely to remain as a polished and influential Dublin commentator. But her highly developed moral character was sure to land her in trouble, and this trouble allowed her to disintegrate adroitly into a modern poet's life. Isolated in the suburbs, visited by real Travellers' horses rather than Pegasus, Boland induced a trauma into Irish poetry for the first time, a politicised feminist viewpoint, a view that was neither traditional nor twilit. This New Collected is the best evidence of that escape from Yeats; of that new life - a woman's life - that she found in poetry.

We make the work, but the work makes who we are. In very many ways it was from the constituency of In Her Own Image and Night Feed (both 1980) that Mary Robinson was elected President of Ireland - as surely as Douglas Hyde was selected from The Love Songs of Connaught and the prose of An Craoibhin Aoibhinn. Boland's 1967 volume New Territory contains The Winning of Etain, an ambitious 38-stanza abababcc-rhymed work of Yeatsian power and a quiver-full of short lyrics dedicated to that TCD band of Kennelly, Norris, Mahon, Grennan etc, and including A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol as well as The Flight of the Earls

Boland has inserted 'from Femininity and Freedom' a fragment of a 1971 play, between New Territory and The War Horse of 1975. This dialogue between Cathal and Deirdre contains nothing of importance except the title that seems like the cry of an introductory chorus, a chorus that announces the isolated suburban existence of a young wife in the bleak years of the Heavy Gang and the fall of the Stormont Assembly. Her "let-downs and erosions" (to use Heaney's phrase) had a maternal focus:

From this work of 1975 to The Journey (1987) Boland sought a determinedly personal, elemental alternative to the common national mythologies. Through the lens of motherhood she discovered the extreme absence of women from political history. In Night Feed and In Her Own Image she developed an aesthetic of menstruation and child-birth, of witchcraft and anorexia: "Flesh is heretic./ My body is a witch./ I am burning it." The intensity of this journey was what distinguished Boland's poetic personality at this time. In The Oral Tradition she overhears women in conversation, leading to a profound insight on history, especially Irish history:

In poems such as The Unlived Life she celebrates quilt-making ("why, you're free to choose"), in Lace she seeks out a language like lace (through which she may lose her sight) and in Envoi these words speak volumes:

By 1998 Boland had made an extraordinary journey, from myth to motherhood to myth of motherhood. The Lost Land is an extraordinary attempt to make new art on old ground; rich poems, deeply personal in that formalised way of feeling so characteristic of Boland or Derek Mahon. The poems of Code (2001) are equally insightful anti-histories brought to poetry by a genius with "her ivory lyre and her hair neatly tied".

This New Collected Poems is an important document: it is the finest evidence ever assembled of the escape from the grip of a tradition. If the procedure of Art is to resist the real while conferring unity upon it, then Eavan Boland, in resisting male histories, has conferred a new meaning upon the phrase "Irish poetry". How blessed we all are that she abandoned swans.

Thomas McCarthy is a Waterford poet who has worked at Cork city libraries since 1978. His latest book is Merchant Prince (Anvil Press, 2005)

New Collected Poems By Eavan Boland Carcanet Press, 320pp. £14.95