Today, March 17, I honor a major female Irish poet who has composed several ekphrastic poems: Eavan Boland.
For more than forty years, Ms. Boland has been writing what I consider to be stunning poetry: mythic or historical narratives, lyrics on motherhood, finely-wrought patterned forms, and translations. Often her poems explore the intersections of timeless myth, personal memory, recorded history, unrecorded history, and the geography of home or homeland. I greatly admire the supple power of her beautiful poems: they are precisely-observed, keenly-felt, elegantly-lineated, and strongly-voiced.
Some of Ms. Boland’s ekphrastic poems were influenced by the paintings of her own mother, an accomplished Irish artist. Other poems were inspired by the work of famous masters. But in my opinion, Ms. Boland’s exacting and educated eye has never been elitist. She has focused also on those common products of female housekeeping and immigrant labor which have sometimes been excluded from the annals of art history. In that same generous spirit, then, I am listing here both what I consider to be her ekphrastic poems, and what I consider to be her object poems.
EKPHRASTICS and OBJECT POEMS OF EAVAN BOLAND
From the Painting “Back from Market” by Chardin
Domestic Interior
Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray
Degas’s Laundresses
Woman Posing
On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
Object Lessons
On the Gift of “The Birds of America” by John James Audubon
The Shadow Doll
Bright-Cut Irish Silver
The Photograph on My Father’s Desk
An Old Steel Engraving
Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child’s Room
The Dolls Museum in Dublin
At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town
The Water-Clock
Lava Cameo
The Art of Grief
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
Imago
In Which Hester Bateman…Takes an Irish Commission
A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago
