The Hour of Change – Thinking About Eavan Boland

When Eavan Boland’s death was announced on April 27th, it hit me quite hard, but that was in the midst of a lot of other difficult things, and it was hard to process, at the same time. I did what many do when a writer beloved to them dies. I took her books off the shelf. While I’ve not been able to read much, I read her familiar words, and just kept saying to myself, oh yes. No wonder I latched onto her words and kept them with me all these years. Other books have been donated, given away, but hers have remained on my shelves, through moves, cullings. In her poetry I saw a lot of the origins of my own writing; her influence is maybe stronger than I’d thought. Her collection Outside History was one of the first books of poetry by a single author that I would have bought, after studying it in an undergraduate class.

She wrote about women writing, living in the suburbs, having small children, in a way that gave me hope and acted in some ways as caution. In the Washington Post’s obituary she’s quoted:

“I used to work out of notebooks, and I learned when I had young children that you can always do something,” she told Stanford magazine in 2002. “If you can’t do a poem, you can do a line. And if you can’t do a line, you can do an image — and that pathway that leads you along, in fragments, becomes astonishingly valuable.”

I’ve written before about the poem I love “The Rooms of Other Women Poets.” I began a post, What Can a Poem Be? by talking about Boland. I wrote Blue Feast with her in the back of my mind, though I might not have known it at the time. (The nicest review of that book was by Gilbert Bouchard, may he also rest in peace: “This is a must-read book that dares to poetically address accessible universal human realities like motherhood, marriage and other similar personal and domestic journeys. Of course, like good still life paintings, while the subject matter might seem mundane, it’s a highly dramatic form (literally a mini-theatrical mise-en-scene crossed with an altar-piece) that an agile artist like Lemay can endlessly plumb for greater (if subtle) political and philosophical ends.” ) Bless you Gilbert.

I have loved the work of Eavan Boland in a quiet and steadfast manner. If I loved her less I could talk about it more.

I’ve internalized her in the same way a lot of Canadian women have internalized Bronwen Wallace, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Elizabeth Smart, Phyllis Webb. They’re sort of part of our DNA. And I think they are even if you haven’t read them.

But okay, let’s look at the first part of the poem, “The Women” by Boland:

This the hour I love: the in-between
neither here-nor-there hour of evening.
The air is tea-coloured in the garden.
The briar rose is spilled crepe de Chine.

This is the time I do my work best,
going up the stairs in two minds,
in two worlds, carrying cloth or glass,
leaving something behind, bringing
something with me I should have left behind.

The hour of change, of metamorphosis,
of shape-shifting instabilities.
My time of sixth sense and second sight
when in the words I choose, the lines I write,
they rise like visions and appear to me:

women of work, of leisure, of the night…. etc…

Boland reminded me that it’s okay to shape-shift, to metamorphose, to be of two minds, to cultivate the sixth sense and second sight. She let me know that I could be a mother and also a writer, that I could live in multiple worlds.

Deeply imbedded in me is the poem, as I have mentioned, “The Rooms of Other Women Poets.” The way she begins, “I wonder about you…” is so beautiful. Because we all wonder about each other, how we are able to do what we do, how we are able to continue, what are the minimum circumstances in which to thrive and make a poem, simultaneously. In her wondering, I felt encouragement, curiosity, companionship. Lord, I wish to give that to anyone, someone, you! That would be enough, really, to know that you could reach out through words and hold someone’s hand or know that your being at your desk, sometimes lonely, sometimes sad and desperate, sometimes so full of joy that it brims over…that this could reach another one such as you have been, hope to be.

The Rooms of Other Women Poets

by Eavan Boland

I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions
of daylight, falling as dusk across your page,

make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think
I see that gesture inthe way you use language.

And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers
dried and fired on the ironstone rim of

the saucer underneath your cup, are a sign of
a savage, old calligraphy: you will not have it.

The chair you use, for instance, may be cane
soaked and curled in spirals, painted white

and eloquent, or iron mesh and the table
a horizon of its own on plain, deal trestles,

bearing up unmarked, steel-cut foolscap,
a whole quire of it; when you leave I know

you look at them and you love their air of
unaggressive silence as you close the door.

The early summer, its covenant, its grace,
is everywhere: even shadows have leaves.

Somewhere you are writing or have written in
a room you came to as I come to this

room with honeyed corners, the interior sunless,
the windows shut but clear so I can see

the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel
the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early.

I have thought a lot about how to be a writer, a woman writer, over the years. I have spent my entire adult life contriving to find time and energy, the energy! to write. I have looked closely at the lives of women writers trying to find the secrets to apply to my own life. I have asked, how can I do the work I want to do, the work I’m able to do, and what is the work I am “allowed” to do, what is the work I will be hindered from, the work I will be given credit for and the work I will be erased from having done, what is the work that I will be thwarted from, and who will thwart me? and given all those variables, how will I refuse to be thwarted, and how will I manage to work in spite of, because of, because of. How will I continue, how will I contrive my own particular set of circumstances so I can say what I want to say, however small?

It’s the strangest thing of all about this Covid-isolation. I have been basically given my dream life on a platter, my hermit writing life, and it turns out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. (Mainly because of the worry….). But that’s fine. Imagine Jane Austen writing, and having all her worries about where she would next be living, upon whom she would be reliant, what obligations she need fulfill.

We just want to work. I in my room, you in yours. I don’t want to be in competition with you, but to send my good wishes to you so that you can send yours to me.

This is what I learned from reading Eavan Boland. How to wonder about you, the importance of that wondering, and to remember that you are wondering about me.

The terrible regret I have is that I might have told her, I might have written her, and did not. And now it is too late, and I hate that. I hate that.

May 18, 2020