A memory of youth

  Sjunde kvinnan i lördagsbloggen är irländska Eavan Boland. Hon har förekommit tidigare, men den här gången blir det hennes senaste bok A woman without a country.

Holy Child Secondary School
Killiney, Dublin

***

  Fast hon är född och utbildad i Dublin, och bildade sin familj där, så har Eavan Boland också bott i USA och i London som barn. Hennes senaste diktsamling, A woman without a country, upptar några av de kontraster och motsägelser som kommer från att leva på en plats utan att känna att man tillhör det till fullo. Källa: Stanford University

  Men för den sakens skull så hindrar det inte henne att skriva så här vackert om födelselandet.

As, by Eavan Boland
(from A woman without a country : poems. New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.)

A squeak of light. Ocean air looking
to come inland, to test its influence on
the salty farms waking.

Mist lifts. The distance 
reappears. In an hour or so

someone will say crystal clear 
even though there is 
no truth in it since even now
the ground is clouding its ions and atoms.

The sun is up; day begins. 
Someone else says dry as dust.
But this is outside Dublin in 
summer: last night’s storm 
left clay and water mixed together.

Phoenix Park

The afternoon is long and warm.
The branch of one tree angles to 
its own heaviness. While everywhere,
everywhere it continues: language 
crossing the impossible 
with the proverbial —

until no one any longer wants 
a world where as is not preferred 
to its absence. Nor a fiddle not fit, 
nor a whistle not clean,
nor rain not right again.

I am walking home. A quarter moon 
rises in the whitebeams.
At the next turn houses appear,
mine among them.

I walk past leaves,
grass, one bicycle. I put my key in the lock.

In a little while I will say safe as.

***

  Genom att problematisera frågor om nation och kön i boken, så har hon funnit ytterligare ett tillvägagångssätt för att bearbeta de teman som har varit utgångspunkter under hela hennes karriär. Källa: Stanford University

  Och det blir knappast mer symboliskt än i nedanstående dikt.

An Island of Daughters, by Eavan Boland
(from A woman without a country : poems. New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.)

Always the same dream,
the one in which
I unstitch the gall ink
and script
from great books,
unbuild Georgian squares,
push aside the waters
the Vikings sailed
and find myself
at last on
an island of daughters.

In which the river, the millrace,
the mulberry trees
stripped of leaves,
stripped of history, the breeze,
even the war memorials
to who we fought
and who fought us
speak with one voice
about the sadness,
the remembrance,
the wretchedness of daughters.

In which there is only
monochrome on
the edge of evening, at
the end of the horizon,
not the thigh-deep grasses
of Ferguson, the magenta seas
of Mangan's dirge,
no refrain, no celebration,
just shadows
of women in
the shadow of a nation.

River Liffey, Dublin

In which a girl
makes her way home in
the predawn,
to a street near the Liffey,
lets herself in, sensing
the blue air of reprimand
that goes with moonlight;
her foot falling
on the one step on the stair
that makes noise,
then a pause; then a voice calling.