We Went: Eavan Boland @ Seattle Arts & Lectures

There are two more poets due in town for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series, both in April. Lucille Clifton shows up at the Intiman on April 7, Edward Hirsch on April 21.

We hadn't been to one of these poetry talks before, and since Irish feminist and poet Eavan Boland read from both her prose and poetry, we're not sure we got a typical experience. Whatever it was, we were happy we dropped in. (And anyway, it seems to have been typical of Boland.)

We learned, first of all, how to pronounce Eavan: [ee-VON].

She began by reading from her book, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time--which was our first clue that like, say, Ted Hughes or Robinson Jeffers, and unlike Yeats, who went prospecting every so often, she's a poet with a claim on a particular vein she likes to mine. She told us about a woman who died in 1909, at the age of 31, at Dublin's National Maternity Hospital. Then she told us the woman was her grandmother, and she'd had to make up that memory of her.

Boland is not just fascinated by the rift between what we consider the past and what we name history--she's compelled by it. Ireland's story is the story of heroes, she said, which leaves little room for people who barely survived, or didn't at all, like her grandmother. As a woman and a poet, she's drawn to these family stories, tales that may or may not be true, but were truly said.

Her poems "That the Science of Cartography Is Limited," "Quarantine," and "How the Dance Came to the City" try to catch up some of those anonymous people, who, instead of acting on history like heroes do, have history acted upon them. Colonization. Famine. Terrorism.

She likes to think her "poems shelter things from the erosions of time and space," and commend those things that others discard as of no value. The most important thing for a young poet, she said, is to get over the feeling that something isn't important enough to be put into a poem, and to discover its import. She has a way with statements that seem plain-spoken, but which resonate: "Nothing is ever entirely / right in the lives of those who love each other."