Eavan Boland Quotes

As soon as I take down her book and open it...My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.

Love will heal What language fails to know

. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.

This is what language is: a habitual grief. A turn of speech for the everyday and ordinary abrasion of losses such as this: which hurts just enough to be a scar And heals just enough to be a nation.

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?” said Rilke.

Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?

The Pomegranate The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell. And found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of it. Ceres and Persephone the names. And the best thing about the legend is I can enter it anywhere. And have. As a child in exile in a city of fogs and strange consonants, I read it first and at first I was an exiled child in the crackling dusk of the underworld, the stars blighted. Later I walked out in a summer twilight searching for my daughter at bed-time. When she came running I was ready to make any bargain to keep her. I carried her back past whitebeams and wasps and honey-scented buddleias. But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me. It is winter and the stars are hidden. I climb the stairs and stand where I can see my child asleep beside her teen magazines, her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit. The pomegranate! How did I forget it? She could have come home and been safe and ended the story and all our heart-broken searching but she reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate. She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance. The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured. The suburb has cars and cable television. The veiled stars are above ground. It is another world. But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up. She will hold the papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips. I will say nothing.

The opposite of passion is not virtue but routine. - Daphne with her Thighs in Bark

Nothing is left in my memory of a summer that promised nothing. except the ominous end of it. But I remember clearly that autumn when darkness came to lend its cover to a killing season seeing at last these ill-at-ease petals estranged from moonlight and still related to it: outcasts of metal, of steel

Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary Somewhere up in the eaves it began: high in the roof – in a sort of vault between the slates and the gutter – a small leak. Through it, rain which came from the east, in from the lights and foghorns of the coast – water with a ghost of ocean salt in it – spilled down on the path below. Over and over and over years stone began to alter, its grain searched out, worn in: granite rounding down, giving way taking into its own inertia that information water brought, of ships, wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour. It happened under our lives: the rain, the stone. We hardly noticed. Now this is the day to think of it, to wonder: all those years, all those years together – the stars in a frozen arc overhead, the quick noise of a thaw in the air, the blue stare of the hills – through it all this constancy: what wears, what endures.

I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. -A WOMAN PAINTED ON LEAF (In a Time of Violence)

the secret histories of things deserve to linger, to belong again to the coil of your hair I found once as a child, dried out by shadows, in a shut-tight wooden box

In the end It will not matter That I was a woman. I am sure of it. The body is a source. Nothing more. There is a time for it. There is a certainty About the way it seeks its own dissolution.

Eurydice Speaks” How will I know you in the underworld? How will we find each other? We lived for so long on the physical earth— Our skies littered with actual stars Practical tides in our bay— What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical? Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls, By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him On the shore of a river written and rewritten As elegy, epic, epode. Remember the thin air of our earthly winters? Frost was an iron, underhand descent. Dusk was always in session And no one needed to write down Or restate, or make record of, or ever would, And never will, The plainspoken music of recognition, Nor the way I often stood at the window— The hills growing dark, saying, As a shadow became a stride And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight I would know you anywhere.

I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it. It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin.

In the end It will not matter That I was a woman. I am sure of it. The body is a source. Nothing more. There is a time for it. There is a certainty About the way it seeks its own dissolution. Consider rivers. They are always en route to Their own nothingness. From the first moment They are going home. And so When language cannot do it for us, Cannot make us know love will not diminish us, There are these phrases Of the ocean To console us. Particular and unafraid of their completion. In the end Everything that burdened and distinguished me Will be lost in this: I was a voice.

Nocturne" After a friend has gone I like the feel of it: The house at night. Everyone asleep. The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening. One-o-clock. A floral teapot and a raisin scone. A tray waits to be taken down. The landing light is off. The clock strikes. The cat comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs, a black ambivalence around the legs of button-back chairs, an insinuation to be set beside the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup, the saucer with the thick spill of tea which scalds off easily under the tap. Time is a tick, a purr, a drop. The spider on the dining-room window has fallen asleep among complexities as I will once the doors are bolted and the keys tested and the switch turned up of the kitchen light which made outside in the back garden an electric room -- a domestication of closed daisies, an architecture instant and improbable.

Change depends on the questions we ask. Always providing we are willing to ask them. And a t a certain point, I set out to find those questions.

I entered my reading the way an echo enters a sound.

Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But there are rules of light there and principles of darkness. . . . The expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self. —Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS

I spent one full hour convincing some friends that women said poems in Ireland before Eavan Boland. The women friends are suspicious. They have English degrees.