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How We Made a New Art on Old Ground

By Eavan Boland b. 1944 Eavan Boland

A famous battle happened in this valley.

You never understood the nature poem.

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements

seem separate, unrelated, follow this

silence to its edge and you will hear

the history of air: the crispness of a fern

or the upward cut and turn around of

a fieldfare or thrush written on it.

The other history is silent: The estuary

is over there. The issue was decided here:

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.

Then one king and one dead tradition.

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds

wait for language, for a different truth:

When you see the silk of the willow

and the wider edge of the river turn

and grow dark and then darker, then

you will know that the nature poem

is not the action nor its end: it is

this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,

on the steering wheel shaft: it is

an aftermath, an overlay and even in

its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with

sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen

And as I write valley straw, metal

blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.

Silence spreads slowly from these words

to those ilex trees half in, half out

of shadows falling on the shallow ford

of the south bank beside Yellow Island

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion

begins to be complete: what we see

is what the poem says:

evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather

about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are

for this moment free of one another.

Eavan Boland, “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground” from Against Love Poetry: Poems. Copyright © 2001 by Eavan Boland. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Poetry (November 2001).

Biography

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944. The daughter of a diplomat and a painter, Boland spent her girlhood in London and New York, returning to Ireland to attend secondary school in Killiney and later university at Trinity College in Dublin. Though still a student when she published her first collection, 23 Poems (1962), Boland’s early work is informed by her experiences as a young wife and mother, and her growing . . .

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