#irish-literature — Public Fediverse posts

Eavan Boland and the emergence of a poetic self

I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet.

This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when her father, a diplomat, took up work in London in the mid-20th century:

Hardly anything else that happened to me as a child was as important as this: that I left one country and came to another. That an ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.

In England, everyday words reinforced her sense of difference and lack: ‘They [the other children at school] could say “orchard” instead of “garden” with the offhand grace imparted by nine-tenths of the law. I could not.’ But it would be an Irish English word that crystallized her alienation:

The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom at school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”

Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.

This account elaborates on Boland’s description of the incident in her poem ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’, which I excerpted in a 2014 post about the Irish use of amn’t.

In her mid-teens Boland returned to live in Ireland and began to explore the inchoate sense of Irishness from which she felt semi-estranged:

Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of my country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places—it was not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct a present self.

I had to learn a new sensory idiom. A fog in the mouth, for example, which was different from the London one: less gritty, with more of an ocean aftertaste. An unkempt greenness on the streets. A drizzle which was interseasonal, constant. Different trees. Different birds.

Nurturing this idiom, she found, years later, that ‘language can reclaim location’, a beautifully concise expression of this insight.

It was not just Irish English with which Boland familiarized herself. In her final year in school she was struggling with Latin, resentful of its difficulty. Then came a turning point:

It was something about the economy of it all: the way the ablative absolute gathered and compressed time. One day, again figuratively, it was a burdensome piece of grammar. The next, with hardly any warning, it was a messenger with quick heels and a bright face. I hardly knew what had happened. I began to respect, however grudgingly, the systems of a language which could make such constructs that, although I had no such words for it, they stood against the disorders of love or history. They had left the mouth of the centurion and entered the mind of a Sicilian farm worker. They had forged alliances and named stars. And at that point of my adolescence, where the words I wrote on a page were nothing but inexact, the precision and force of these constructs began to seem both moving and healing.

As Boland developed her poetic ability and her confidence in its effect, she found herself entering a heavily male tradition. There were pivotal encounters with avatars of that tradition: with Padraic Colum at an elevator; with Patrick Kavanagh in a café in Dublin (his style of speech ‘shy and apocalyptic’).

But the constraints of history and structural intransigence pressed tight:

Gradually the anomaly of my poetic existence was clear to me. By luck, or its absence, I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it seemed, live in both. As the author of poems I was an equal partner in Irish poetry. As a woman—about to set out on the life which was the passive object of many of those poems—I had no voice. It had been silenced, ironically enough, by the very powers of language I aspired to and honored.

Object Lessons abounds in eloquent, carefully honed ideas about womanhood and nationhood and the complications of a poetic self at their intersections. For this post I’ve selected just a few language-themed passages; if they appeal to you, you’ll enjoy Boland’s book.

@SecularJeffrey
2/2
Cautious sorts will be asking, "Nudged how?", and that'd be better decided by listening. Though "more of the world as lived in by the Gaffer and other worthies of The Shire" might give a start.
The following hashtag is just to scare off the weak of heart. And give bragging rights to the brave. (Yes, technically it's literature. But ... well look at the video ... harmless right?)
#IrishLiterature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqM4FKksw8

Not many literature audiobooks that are sufficiently enthralling in 30 second walk-bys.

But Niall Williams' Faha books, "The History of the Rain", "This Is Happiness" and "Time of the Child" have this property for me.

#NiallWilliams #IrishLiterature #Bookstadon #Meaning #Narrative

"Seekers of Wonder" by Elena E. Sottilotta pioneers the comparison of women's roles in Italian & #IrishFolklore & #FairyTales 1870-1920 collected / written by #WomenWriters Laura Gonzenbach, Grazia Deledda, #JaneWilde & #AugustaGregory

#IrishLiterature #IrishStudies #Folklore

𝙍𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬: "𝘼 𝙋𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙜 𝙈𝙖𝙣" 𝙗𝙮 𝙅𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙅𝙤𝙮𝙘𝙚 -

If we allow the novel to work on its own terms, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story, we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek.

https://waywordsstudio.com/general/reviews/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/

#bookreviews #literature #books #bookworm #read #book #readreadread #jamesjoyce #fiction #autobiography #irishliterature #modernism #streamofconsciousness

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce https://hokkaidomarket.net/books-info.php?item=1491 #CLASSIC #BOOKS #BOOKSHOP #FICTION #LITERATURE #IRISHLITERATURE #IRELAND #bookstodon

I have compiled a list of Ulster Cycle materials, including prose narratives (mostly what is in the Ulidia 1994 list) but also dindshenchas articles, some poems, and items from Cóir Anmann. There were 75 titles on the original Ulidia list, and over 200 here, so I hope that it will help lead people to some of the lesser known stories, poems, and other bits and pieces. It's available on Knowledge Commons (a wonderful and non-profit alternative to academia.edu, you can follow them @hello). The titles all link directly to CODECS for information about editions, translations, etc. (Thank you to @codecs for being such a fantastic resource!) I hope people will find it useful. It's just a first version and there will certainly be many changes and additions needed in future, but I think it's in a state to be of some interest and use, at least. Corrections and suggestions are very welcome!

https://works.hcommons.org/records/bdb7a-50d66

#UlsterCycle #IrishLiterature #MedievalLiterature #MedievalIrishLiterature #CelticStudies

A review of a book about a book about a writer
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n16/seamus-perry/beaverosity

#books #literature #JamesJoyce #IrishLiterature #writers #RichardEllmann

Archaeoethnologica: The Finn Cicle - Book / O Ciclo de Finn - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/07/o-ciclo-de-finn-livro.html

#CelticStudies #epic #irishliterature #celts #Mythology #celticmythology #Medieval #books #openaccess

Archaeoethnologica: The Finn Cicle - Book / O Ciclo de Finn - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/07/o-ciclo-de-finn-livro.html

#CelticStudies #epic #irishliterature #celts #Mythology #celticmythology #Medieval #books #openaccess

Archaeoethnologica: The Finn Cicle - Book / O Ciclo de Finn - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/07/o-ciclo-de-finn-livro.html

#CelticStudies #epic #irishliterature #celts #Mythology #celticmythology #Medieval #books #openaccess

Archaeoethnologica: The Finn Cicle - Book / O Ciclo de Finn - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/07/o-ciclo-de-finn-livro.html

#CelticStudies #epic #irishliterature #celts #Mythology #celticmythology #Medieval #books #openaccess

RIP, Maeve Kelly https://tramppress.com/maeve-kelly/

Her book of short stories "Orange Horses" is one of the strongest collections I've ever read: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/savouring-each-preposition/

#MaeveKelly #writers #IrishLiterature #books #ShortStories #writing

Black Diamond: yuppie life in the new South Africa
https://khanya.wordpress.com/2019/05/16/black-diamond-yuppie-life-in-the-new-south-africa/
#bookstodon #IrishLiterature #bookreviews

Archaeoethnologica: People, Prehistory & the Past - Book / Gente, Pré-história e Passado - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/06/gente-pre-historia-e-passado-livro.html

#Archaeology #Protohistory #Prehistory #MedievalArchaeology #megalithism #BronzeAge #Ireland #celts #irishliterature #memory #epic #epigraphy #IronAge #book #JohnWaddell

Archaeoethnologica: People, Prehistory & the Past - Book / Gente, Pré-história e Passado - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/06/gente-pre-historia-e-passado-livro.html

#Archaeology #Protohistory #Prehistory #MedievalArchaeology #megalithism #BronzeAge #Ireland #celts #irishliterature #memory #epic #epigraphy #IronAge #book #JohnWaddell

Archaeoethnologica: People, Prehistory & the Past - Book / Gente, Pré-história e Passado - Livro

+INFO in: https://archaeoethnologica.blogspot.com/2025/06/gente-pre-historia-e-passado-livro.html

#Archaeology #Protohistory #Prehistory #MedievalArchaeology #megalithism #BronzeAge #Ireland #celts #irishliterature #memory #epic #epigraphy #IronAge #book #JohnWaddell

For #Bloomsday, here are my drawings of Joyce himself and also of Flann O’Brien who, well-refreshed, was one of the originators of Bloomsday in 1954.

#JamesJoyce #FlannOBrien #IrishLiterature

On the way home, frustrated by the frequency of requests, Joyce and Beckett are making for toilet stops, the carriage driver decides not to wait for Beckett's to return from the toilet, and left him “ingloriously abandoned on the outskirts of Paris”. 2/2

#Ireland #IrishLiterature #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #Bloomsday #SamuelBeckett #Paris #Versailles #OnThisDay

On 16 June 1924 friends send Joyce, who is in hospital, a bouquet of white and blue hydrangeas. He writes in his notebook: “Today 16 of June 1924 twenty years after. Will anybody remember this date?”

#IrishLiterature #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #Bloomsday #Dublin #OnThisDay

16 June is Bloomsday, a commemoration and celebration of the life of James Joyce during which the events of Ulysses (set on 16 June 1904) are relived. Joyce chose the date because it was the date of his first outing with Nora Barnacle when they walked to Ringsend.

#IrishLiterature #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #Bloomsday #Dublin #Ringsend #OnThisDay