Eavan Boland is domestic but not domesticated. Like other Irish poets, she has been formed by a national culture that has become national myth, however riven and violently marked that culture has been. When she writes about Daphne, Daphne is trapped in a kitchen. New mythologies are rarely less sentimental than the old, and Ms. Boland avoids few of the obvious risks. She is expert in the passionless household poem, its subject the incident reminiscent, its tone the retrospect melancholy, its diction the vernacular significant.
Every object is a little too neatly or symbolically in order.
When a mug breaks, a love affair is over. For Ms. Boland, the kitchen is a mortuary, but in poem after poem the kitchen and the garden remain scenes of her bloodless anger. When a poet is so self-divided, so drawn to the realms she despises, it should not be surprising if her poetry suffers division too, here between prose and the poetic. That division affects many poets, whose very inheritance may be division, but rarely does it do so as forcefully. The featureless prose and aimless, airless philosophizing of Ms. Boland's work are transformed only by a love of pure detail, of the incandescence of the visual.