The Other Eavan Boland by Jee Leong Koh
PN Review 220, November - December 2014
This short piece will not do for Eavan Boland what Randall Jarrell did for Robert Frost or what Boland herself did for Sylvia Plath in her essay collection A Journey with Two Maps. It will not rescue a different Eavan Boland overlooked or ignored by critics. Its ambition is laughably much smaller. As I re-read her New Collected Poems in order to write this tribute, I was struck by the consistencies in the long and well-known course of this poet’s development. What were they? The high-mindedness, for one. For another, the tolerance of ambiguity. For a third, the feeling for others’ suffering. These were the qualities that first drew me to her poetry, and that still engage me.
And so I thought I would write about the great help Eavan Boland gives me, a gay Singapore poet, in resisting and re-envisioning a patriarchal and colonial literary heritage. Now that would be a suitably weighty subject for a tribute. But as Boland has taught me to ask, what gives me my sense of what is suitable and what not? Whose dictates and decorum am I obeying? So, flipping back and forth in the book, I began to entertain a somewhat impertinent question: does Eavan Boland have a sense of humour?
Of course I mean in the poetry, having met the person only for a minute in the dazed atmosphere of a poetry reading. And I am happy to report after a conscientious search that in the tome of New Collected Poems there is at least one poem that induces a case of the funnies. For that reason, if not for any other, ‘The Fire in Our Neighbourhood’, from the 1987 volume The Journey, is rather special.
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The title is less than promising, fires being, after all, no laughing matter. But the first line suggests otherwise, with its odd locution. The sign factory ‘went on fire’ last night, as if a conflagration is a kind of labour dispute. This is, however, not to be a socialist poem, for the factory, as the speaker corrects herself, is not really a factory. It is more like a workshop where they painted window signs ‘when times / were good’. It is no dark satanic mill. Sure, the poem goes on to refer to sawmills, but they are the rehearsal studio of the local rock band – made up of ageing poet-rockers? – who practise on Saturdays ‘with the loud out-of-tune bass guitar’.
If the places threatened by fire refuse to become signs of seriousness, the same goes for the fire. Although the paint cans went off ‘like rifle fire’, the only guns involved here are paintball guns, thank goodness. In the flickering light of the flames, ordinary things such as garden walls and pools of rain received a ‘violent ornamentation’ that would disappear the moment the fire was put out. The violence would not take hold. The speaker even makes fun of poets’, her own, love for exotic words. In the world elaborated, or ornamented, by flamelight, simple cloth and wood became ‘gimp and tatting, guipure and japanning’. How absurd to be thinking of Japan as Rome burns!
But we knew the fire brigade were on their way; we knew it as far back as stanza two in this poem of six stanzas. And when they arrived, they made short work of the fire. ‘It didn’t take long’ is the shortest sentence of the poem. The next shortest is ‘And the flames went out’. This fire brigade knew what they were doing. They even turned their hoses on the sawmills, which might or might not be burning, so that no stray spark could mate with a mote of dust.
Pity the ageing rockers, excited as schoolboys, when they arrived at their rehearsal studio after a week’s wage slavery only to find damp ash. Perhaps we would not be blasted by that tuneless bass guitar for one glorious Saturday, the speaker thought, as the night became dark again. The fire was exciting enough. Pity the neighbours ‘who slept through the excitement’. The poem ends with what almost amounts to glee at what the neighbours missed. The ending is, however, shot through with humour directed at oneself. The night ‘belonged’, after all, to the sleeping neighbours. Unlike the speaker, they would have their uninterrupted rest. The neighbourhood had been safe from the fire all along.
The sly humour in the poem is not merely a matter of tone but is finally a place – the speaker’s window – from which to view the fire, the destruction of things. Painfully aware of the fires of the past, Boland is determined to rescue suffering lives from the inferno by giving them voice and shape in her poetry. I think of her fever wards and stabbed stars. The other Boland, at least in this one poem, knows that in some grand scheme, everything will be all right. Such knowledge, the daughter of comedy, is rightly elusive.
This article by Jee Leong Koh is taken from PN Review 220, November - December 2014.
Moving and exact. I admire Boland for the ambition of her poems, from the domestic, which she does superbly, to her attention to history in all its manifestations (family, global), and for her often heart-wrenching clarity and music. I knew her slightly - we lived in the same group of apartments at Stanford and met occasionally for coffee. Once, I think I recall, I mentioned the use of humour in poetry -- perhaps we were discussing Plath, whose humour is too rarely evoked -- and Eavan looking a little surprised at my pleasure in the use of humour -- or shall I say touches of humour -- in lyrics. Thank you for this essay.