#evan boland

[mv11]

[lunchboxpoems]

ATLANTIS - A LOST SONNET

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city — arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals — had all one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then. Surely a great city must have been missed? I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.

EAVAN BOLAND

[promisedlandexile]

Exerpt from Evan Boland’s ‘Anna Liffey’

[so this is some kind of tumblr journal for my writing nonsense, inspiration, and other such things]

[alexicon91]

The Room in Which My First Child Slept BY EAVAN BOLAND After a while I thought of it this way: It was a town underneath a mountain crowned by snow and every year a river rushed through, enveloping the dusk in a noise everyone knew signaled spring— a small town, known for a kind of calico, made there, strong and unglazed, a makeshift of cotton in which the actual unseparated husks still remained and could be found if you looked behind the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird with swept-back wings always trying to arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it might have occupied if anyone had offered it. And if you ask me now what happened to it— the town that is—the answer is of course there was no town, it never actually existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton on which a bird never landed is not gone, because it never was, never once, but then how to explain that sometimes I can hear the river in those first days of April, making its way through the dusk, having learned to speak the way I once spoke, saying as if I didn't love you, as if I wouldn't have died for you. Source: Poetry (October 2006)

The Room in Which My First Child Slept by Evan Boland

[dk-thrive]

How my mind shadows

flush. I darken. How my flesh summers, how my mind shadows, meshed in this brightness — Eavan Boland, “Solitary” from New Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition, November 30, 2009)

[tumbleword-blog]

This time I would see... They were separate fields of meaning--rich and problematic and inviting of new perspectives. Above all, their co-existence, even as contradiction, was not only possible but desirable. If art--and indeed poetry--was shaped by the interplay of individual and communal, then there was a chance to look into the fire of those contradictions, as if into a moment of origin. ... We can and should draw two maps... can and should entertain even conflicted ideas to find a path through contradiction... without needing to erase one with the other. That we can take apparently opposed views of the history and practice of {this} art, and hold them reflectively in our hands as if they were two maps. And yet, in the end, come safely to a single destination.

Evan Boland excerpt A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet