An accomplished collection from Eavan Boland.

Keating-Miller, Jennifer

EAVAN BOLAND

Domestic Violence

Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007, 8.95 [pounds sterling]

LIKE THE METAPHORICAL cycles of time that spiral throughout each poem, Boland's most recent volume offers carefully rendered, muscular verse that is syncopated with tidbits of wisdom and grace, exemplary of a well seasoned poet. As always, the thrust of Boland's work juxtaposes Ireland's national imperatives crossing the thresholds of suburban domestic interiors. But in these poems Boland catalogs many of Ireland's cultural and political permutations that jockey alongside her personal consideration of an individual's journey into middle age.

From the opening poem, Boland doses distances between Ireland's national narrative and the personal history of the region's citizens. "How young we were, how ignorant, how ready / to think the only history was our own," she writes in the opening poem, "Domestic Violence." Focusing on a vision of youth that can only be articulated through hindsight, Boland's mention of "how young we were, how ignorant" refers not only to a newly-wed couple but a fledgling nation, emerging from years of colonial rule with fervent efforts to assert political and cultural sovereignty, falling to mythmaking that espouses the idea that "the only history was our own." Crafting the domestic interior of "the suburbs" as inextricably linked to the intimacy and almost claustrophobic political composition of Ireland's divided island, "Domestic Violence" cites the couple's marriage as contemporaneous to "that season" when "suddenly our island / broke out its old sores for all to see." Although distanced from the "killings, killings, killings, / then moonlight-coloured funerals/" by their "ancient twelve by fifteen television," Boland's couple's dismay at "what it is / is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other" makes them no less culpable.

Joining the fate of all of Ireland's citizenry, Boland gently demands, "if I can be safe in / the weak spring light of that kitchen, then / why is there another kitchen, spring light / always darkening in it and / a woman whispering to a man / over and over what else could we have done?" in section 3 of "Domestic Violence." Attempting to undermine the often comfortable distance between the Republic and Northern Ireland, worlds apart in regard to levels of violence but nonetheless fused by "its old sores for all to see," Boland reflects on the interconnections between early married life mad a fledgling partitioned nation's attempt to come to terms with incessant disputes not unlike the "couple who quarreled into the night." As she writes, "We failed our moment or our moment failed us. / The times were grand in size and we were small" to open final section of the poem, she quickly retracts such rhetoric with the curt, stinging, "Why do I Write that I when I don't believe it?" Asking her audience to join her in an effort to come to terms with individual participation (active or passive) in the recent history of the shared territory of "our island," Boland's reflections betray both regret and whispers of wisdom from lessons learned. "As for that couple did we ever / find out who they were / and did we want to?" Boland asks in the final stanza of the poem. The haunting answer binds the individual and national strands at play throughout with the admittance of personal accountability: "I think we know" Boland writes, "I think we always knew."

While Ireland's national imperatives never wander far from Boland's threshold, Domestic Violence also documents the personal journey of an individual's relationship with the contradiction of time. At once abstract and wholly concrete, poems like "Amber" offer meditations on time and the role that memory or an "ornament of ember / you once gave me" can play at eroding the seeming inevitability of its passage. Contrasting images of "trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping" and "a plastic gold dropping" of amber in the early lines of the poem, Boland suggests her amber "ornament" challenges our notions of reason that "says ... / The dead cannot see the living. / The living will never see the dead again." In the "sunny atmosphere" of her present moment, Boland's amber trinket makes "collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers" seem "as alive as they ever were / as though the past could be present and memory itself Baltic honey." In its crystal preservation Boland's amber bends notions of time through the seeds, leaves and small feathers that offer glimpses of "trees on their hillsides" from centuries, before that may not differ drastically from our own perceptions of the past. She describes the metaphor of memory in amber as "a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much / can be kept safe." But this preservation is of course bittersweet--the ornament is just that. It is a trinket to remind her of someone who "on this fine September afternoon" is "absent." Offering herself to the unyielding pull of time--whether abstract or literal--the poem's final Clause inextricably joins the amber ornament and the metaphor of the poet's depiction of memory--"inside a flawed translucence." Inevitably tainted though crystallized, in our mind's eye, Boland's "Amber" suggests these ornaments from our past will just have to be enough to remind us of time, long gone by.

Whether contemplating motherhood in "Inheritance" or the passing of her own mother in "An Elegy for my Mother in Which She Scarcely Appears," Boland's wanderings engage the imagination of the individual reader and the broader expanse that is Ireland in poems like "In Coming Days." This is an accomplished collection, demonstrating Boland's range and mastery of language that literally speaks from and to multiple generations. In Domestic Violence Boland Offers a weighty volume that considers and challenges our notions of relations to nations, family, memory and time with graceful strokes reminiscent of the image of Julie Manet that appears in. "On This Earth," This is a significant collection of poetry that-not only enriches the long legacy of Irish letters to which Boland has steadily contributed in recent decades but will enrich the lives of students, instructors and leisurely readers of poetry alike,

--University of Pittsburgh