A Woman Without a Country

Eavan Boland's A Woman Without a Country poetry collection

A Woman Without a Country was the ninth collection of poetry to be written by Irish poet Eavan Boland. It was published in 2014 to positive critical reviews. By the time of publication, Boland was recognised as an important and successful Irish poet.

A Woman Without a Country focuses on Irish history and mythology, as well as on gender issues. These are areas Boland is well known for writing on in her poetry. She often wrote about the historical suffering of the Irish people, particularly Irish women. Boland also draws in elements of Greek and Roman myth in this collection. In A Woman Without a Country, Boland mixes national and personal issues. Both are discussed and intertwined. She explores the impact of emigration on one's sense of national identity, and how women frequently become lost in history and forgotten.

Boland's collection is split into four sections, each with a different title. The four sections are 'Song and Error', 'A Woman Without a Country', 'The Trials of Our Faith', and 'Edge of Empire'. A Woman Without a Country emphasises the importance of the past and its impact on the present.

Eavan Boland's 'A Woman Without a Country' poem

The A Woman Without a Country collection contains a title poem of the same name. It appears within a section of the collection that also holds the same name. 'A Woman Without a Country' is a thirty-line poem with only one stanza.

Boland's poem follows the story of an artist who specialises in metal engraving. He is working during the time of the Potato Famine in Ireland.

The engraver is creating a picture of an unnamed woman. In 'A Woman Without a Country', Boland focuses on historical and gender issues. She uses dark and ominous language and tone to portray the engraver's portrait of this woman. We can see this language in the quote below.

Boland uses graphic bodily imagery to describe the portrait of the woman. She is using the poetic device of metaphor here. The nameless woman represents the countless victims of the famine. The poem contains words like 'rags' and 'bony' to emphasise poverty and starvation.

The woman's figure is also relevant because of the theme of gender in 'A Woman Without a Country'. Eavan Boland creates an imbalance between the engraver and the woman he portrays. The woman is nameless and is not afforded a voice of her own. The engraver creates an image of her that only he controls. The woman's lack of control is shown in the title of Boland's poem. She has no power over how she is represented or how she may be remembered. This is significant as she is a figure linked to a recorded historical period.

A Woman Without a Country poem analysis

Now we will analyse some other poems in Boland's collection.

A Woman Without a Country: 'Art of Empire'

'Art of Empire' is an important poem in Boland's A Woman Without a Country collection. It mixes the themes of gender and history that often reoccur in Boland's poetry. Boland's poem is six stanzas long with each stanza consisting of four lines.

'Art of Empire' is about Eavan Boland's grandmother. The poem addresses the issue of silence that is forced on people by both imperialism and gender inequality.

Boland herself lived in an independent Ireland, but her grandmother lived during the time of British rule. Silence would have been critical in such a world to ensure her safety. Boland also points out that, as a woman under occupation, keeping quiet was even more key.

These lines tap into a common theme in the A Woman Without a Country collection and in Boland's work generally. This theme is women's lack of place in the world. As a young poet, Boland was frustrated by the lack of female poets and poems that featured strong female central figures. She also noted how little women's stories were recorded in history. We can say that 'Art of Empire' is her attempt to record her own grandmother's quiet history.

A Woman Without a Country: 'Talking to My Daughter Late at Night'

'Talking to My Daughter Late at Night', consisting of one stanza and thirty-six lines, is a very personal poem for Boland. She had two daughters, and it is clear that this poem addresses one of them. In this poem, Eavan Boland again shines a light on female issues in discussing a mother-daughter relationship.

This poem revolves around motherhood, forgiveness, and the past. The narrator of 'Talking to My Daughter Late at Night' is a maternal figure looking back at her now adult daughter's childhood. Boland begins her poem by creating pleasant and comfortable imagery. The tone is one of familiarity.

Boland soon emphasises that the narrator's daughter did not always have a perfect childhood. She looks back on upsetting moments in her daughter's life that it is much too late to change. Spending these late nights together seems to offer a moment of intimacy and reconciliation between the mother and daughter.

'Talking to My Daughter Late at Night' frequently uses the poetic device of enjambment.

Enjambment is used for multiple purposes in poetry. In Boland's case, she may be using it to aid the language in her poem in seeming more natural. It is written from the perspective of a mother addressing her daughter, and run-on lines are close to how most people typically speak. Below is an example of enjambment in 'Talking to My Daughter Late at Night'.

Eavan Boland's A Woman Without a Country themes

Let's look at the most common themes found in A Woman Without a Country.

A Woman Without a Country: Female legacy

The key nature of women's issues is a constant in the work of Eavan Boland. Many of the poems in A Woman Without a Country revolve around female characters and their lives. These are both modern women and women from years past. Boland is creating a poetic legacy for women that she believes has been lacking in the canon.

Eavan Boland hints towards this theme in the title of her collection. A Woman Without a Country suggests how little both poetry and history have represented women, despite any influential roles they may have played.

A significant amount of the poems in Boland's collection centre around different aspects of the female experience. For example, 'Art of Empire' details how repressive the world was for Irish women under British imperial rule. Whereas 'Talking to My Daughter Late at Night' records an intimate and specific representation of motherhood.

A Woman Without a Country: Irish history

Eavan Boland tried to capture the realities of Irish history in her poetic work. She frequently used dark and harsh language and imagery to capture this theme. A Woman Without a Country collection is no different.

The final section of the collection is entitled 'Edge of Empire'. It contains a selection of poems that revolve around the experience of empire from an Irish perspective in the late Victorian period.

'Reading the Victorian Novel' is a poem included in this section of A Woman Without a Country. Boland ironically uses tropes of the traditional Victorian novel to point out the hypocrisies of the British Empire. She then urges the speaking of words that portray the real impact of the Empire, as seen in the quote below.

These words reveal what the British Empire was to Ireland. But the stereotypical Victorian characters in Boland's poem ignore this and continue to live their idyllic lives.

A Woman Without a Country: Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. Her mother was a painter and her father was a diplomat. Due to her father's occupation, Boland lived in London and New York during her childhood. She returned to Dublin at the age of fourteen. Boland then attended Trinity College Dublin. She received a degree in English Literature and Language.

Boland began to work as a teacher and reviewer for The Irish Times. She married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969. The couple had two daughters together.

New Territory (1967) was Boland's first published collection of poetry. It was not an overwhelming critical success. As Boland continued to publish, she began to gain popularity. She became known for her care in capturing the lives of Irish women and her efforts to shed light on the dark parts of Irish history and society. Some of Eavan Boland's collections include In Her Own Image (1980), In a Time of Violence (1994), and A Woman Without a Country (2014).

Boland passed away in 2020 from a stroke. By her death, she had become a highly respected literary figure.