(Re)membering the Disembodied Verse
Constructs of Identity in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry
CARMEN ZAMORANO LLENA
It is critics who talk of “an authentic voice”; but a poet, living his uncertainties, is riddled with different voices, many of them in vicious conflict. The poem is the arena where the voices engage each other in open and hidden conflict, and continue to do so until they are all heard.1
N “CHILD OF OUR TIME,” a poem included in Eavan Boland’s The War Horse (1980), her second collection of poetry, Boland captures the I instant of awakening to the hidden truths of Irish history. There is a realization that, at the time of writing the poem, the pre-established order of Irish tradition has come to an end, and there is also the awareness that in the apparent upheaval brought about by the end of a period – symbolized by the child’s “unreasoned end,” “the discord of your murder” – the female persona has found a new order, a new beginning:
And living, learn, must learn from you dead, To make our broken images, rebuild Themselves around your limbs, your broken Image, [...] [...], a new language.2
These closing lines are an expression of the foundations of the work of the women poets discussed in this essay. Their main aim is to create a “new lan- guage” of literary expression that will allow them to incorporate female
1 Brendan Kennelly, “Preface” to Kennelly, A Time for Voices: Selected Poems 1960– 1990 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990): 12. 2 Eavan Boland, “Child of Our Time,” in Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester: Car- canet, 1995): 30. 350 C ARMEN Z AMORANO L LENA ½¾ voices and human female figures into the broken body of Irish literary tradi- tion, and to (re)define the sclerotic constructs of femininity and Irishness that were largely defined by nineteenth-century poetry, and whose remnants can still be found in some contemporary works. In the case of Eavan Boland, The War Horse already contains a conscious attempt to (re)define her place “in a city and a poetic world where the choices and assumptions were near enough to those of a nineteenth century poet.”3 One of the poets who was developing his work in that poetic world and whose work has been connected to the nineteenth-century nationalist tradition4 is Seamus Heaney, who, around the time of the composition of Eavan Boland’s The War Horse, gave a relevant lecture at the Ulster Museum. In this lecture, whose publication under the title “The Sense of Place” in his collection of essays Preoccupations coincides with the publication of Boland’s The War Horse, Heaney defines a sense of Irish identity as emer- ging out of an attachment to place, characterized by its combination of the illiterate and unconscious, on the one hand, and the learned, literate and conscious, on the other. After analysing the construction of this attachment to place in the work of various contemporary Irish (male) poets, Heaney con- cludes:
We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories. And when we look for the history of our sensibilities I am con- vinced, as Professor J.C. Beckett was convinced about the history of Ireland generally, that it is to what he called the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity.5
The relevance of Heaney’s words to the present essay is twofold. On the one hand, what Heaney says shows his understanding of the main traits of Irish identity as he constructs it in his work, especially in his bog poems; this is, significantly, connected to nineteenth-century Irish nationalist poetry. On the other, they contain the traditional construct of Irish identity which various contemporary women poets have felt the need to (re)define, so as to enable their location in the Irish literary and cultural tradition.
3 Eavan Boland, Preface, Collected Poems, ix. 4 For the connection of Heaney’s poetry to the Irish nationalist political tradition and, more specifically, to the nineteenth-century nationalist Patrick Pearse, see Patricia Cough- lan’s “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney,” in Seamus Heaney, ed. Michael Allen (London: Macmillan, 1997): 185– 205. See also David Lloyd’s “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity,” in Seamus Heaney, ed. Allen, 155–84. 5 Seamus Heaney, “The Sense of Place,” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber & Faber, 1980): 148–49. My emphases.