“Single Out the Devalued”: The figure of the nonhuman animal in Eavan Boland’s poetry
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Date
2021-05-23
Authors
O'Connor, Maureen
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Publisher
Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses and University of São Paulo
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Abstract
Boland has argued that “good nature poets are always subversive” and, though she did not identify as a nature poet, she compares her praxis to theirs: “their lexicon is the overlooked and the disregarded…. They single out the devalued and make a deep, metaphorical relation between it and some devalued parts of perception.” Boland’s engagement with the “natural” rarely provides a focus for analyses of her work, which predominantly attend to the poet’s own frequently identified preoccupations: her relationship to history, especially Irish history, and her role as an Irish woman writing within and against a largely male-dominated tradition. However, both of these issues of ambivalent and insecure identification and situatedness are implicitly connected to cultural constructions of the “natural.” This essay traces Boland’s negotiation with a legacy of Irish women’s silence by considering the appearance of the nonhuman animal in her verse, which evolves from traditional metaphor to a figure that challenges representational norms and expectations, thereby transvaluing the signifying power of silence and questioning the status of language itself, particularly as a uniquely human construct.
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Keywords
Irish women’s writing , Irish poetry , Ecofeminism , New materialism , Animal studies , Eavan Boland
Citation
O’Connor, M. (2021). “Single Out the Devalued”: The Figure of the Nonhuman Animal in Eavan Boland’s Poetry. ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 23(2), pp. 35-49. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v23i2.197751