Irish Studies
Chair: Rosemary E. Johnsen
Michigan State University
johnsenr@msu.edu

Representations of the Silent Other:  Eavan Boland and the Female Poet 

Eavan Boland entered the Irish literary and academic establishments in the 1960s when she became interested in connecting Ireland’s traditional poetic forms with a growing awareness of Irish womanhood.  However, in the 1980s Irish anthologies routinely excluded female writers and poets, and Boland’s poetry and prose reflect the insensitivity of this exclusion.  As a young woman and writer, her exposure to the canonical poets Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Housman, and Auden heightened her awareness of the absence of women in Irish literature, provoking her rejection of a male dominated literary tradition.  Although critics often credit Boland for giving voice to Irish women and for gendering the Irish poem, Boland herself would stress that “the issue of women’s poetry in Ireland includes gender but isn’t confined to it” (Allen-Randolph 48).  Ireland is a dynamic country that has experienced many cultural and ideological changes over time, and in her work Boland addresses key issues concerning acceptance of change.  This essay will chart Boland’s profound interests in Irish womanhood and Irish nationhood, as both interests are essential contributors to the development of a poetic theory that focuses on giving voice to a previously silenced other in Irish literature. 

Elizabeth Bensen-Barber
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
ebbmatisse@charter.net

Eavan Boland and the Ceres Myth: Light, Love, and Loss

Throughout her poetic career, many of Eavan Boland’s poems have concerned themselves with the ethics of representation—of Irish history, of women’s lives, of parenting and marriage, of artistic images themselves.  Her poems speculate about the dark presences that frame the more visible portions of all of these concerns.  Deeply concerned about what has somehow been excised from what we can perceive, those features that a conventional narrative excludes, Boland has been attracted to the myth of Ceres, a foundational tale about the terms of love.  In her 1994 collection, In a Time of Violence, arguably her best, Boland describes how throughout her life she has “entered” the myth, how her ability to value what is illuminated and featured must comprehend the need to explore the figurative darkness of Hades.  In other words, her poetic ethos demands an acceptance of and a speculative curiosity about what is lost.  The paper will center on two poems, “The Pomegranate” and “The Source,” both of which probe the idea of loss—lost land and lost child. 

Thomas W. Zelman
College of St. Scholastica
Tzelman@css.edu

"Another mode of narrative": Contemporary Irish minority women's writing as a counter to the Irish literary canon

This paper will focus on Rosaleen McDonagh, a Traveller woman dramatist. She is the first Traveller woman to run for the senate in Ireland and she is a disabled rights activist, feminist, and activist on behalf of institutionalised children. (She has MS and was herself institutionalised as a child.) McDonagh will be situated as part of a Traveller women's response to the Irish (mainly male) literary canon that has been emerging since the 1970s. Her first play was produced in the last few years, and McDonagh’s is an important young voice.

Mary Burke
Univ. of Connecticut
de_burcam@hotmail.com