“Priestess or sacrifice?” Domestic Tasks and Poetic Craft in Eavan Boland’s poetry

Abstract

This article looks at the relationship between housework and poetry in Eavan Boland’s poetry. Like many other women poets of her generation, Boland had an ambivalent relationship to the domestic, as she was well aware of the dangerous tendency to confine women’s poetry to the domestic realm. My intention in this article is to show how she modified the woman’s poet relationship to the “domestic muse”. Drawing on poems taken mainly but not exclusively from her two collections published in the early 1980s, In Her Own Image and Night Feed, and placing her poetry in dialogue both with her critical writing of the time and with two of her main American influences, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, this article argues that Boland considered domestic routine as enabling her poetic craft rather than hindering it. Housework provided a model for poetic work and allowed the poet to bridge the gap between poetic craft and other crafts, such as painting, which was linked to her artist-mother. Eavan Boland’s aim was to make the domestic poem political and, by doing so, she changed the landscape of Irish poetry and women’s poetry.