Past, Secrecy and Absence in Eavan Boland’s The Historians

Abstract

This paper draws on Eavan Boland’s final volume of poetry, The Historians, published posthumously in October 2020. By examining in detail some poems taken from her first sequence in the collection, I will investigate how Boland returns to previous concerns in her work, particularly the tensions between revelation and concealment, veiling and unveiling, a transparent history and an obscure past. As I intend to show, when imagining the past, Boland incorporates constant ruptures and interruptions, revealing that there are details in her act of poetic reimagination which resist being incorporated into a lineal, continuous narrative. In order to study this aspect, I will rely on prominent scholars such as Abbott (2013), Brooks (1992), Calinescu (1994), and Attridge (2021), who have examined the role that mystery, secrets and the unknowable play in the construction of narrative sequences. In particular, I will examine various formal techniques employed by Boland: 1) the deliberate use of plain, non-ornamental diction, and short verse lines, highlighting even further the presence of absence; 2) her disruption of lineal narratives by the widening and narrowing of poetic perspective and scope, and 3) her delayed disclosure of ‘secrets’. By means of all these formal, stylistic devices, Boland shows that secrecy is an intrinsic quality of the past.