Belonging

John Kerrigan

• The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird by Justin Quinn
  Carcanet, 69 pp, £7.95, March 1995, ISBN 1 85754 125 1
• Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time by Eavan Boland
  Carcanet, 254 pp, £18.95, April 1995, ISBN 1 85754 074 3
• Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
  Carcanet, 217 pp, £9.95, November 1995, ISBN 1 85754 220 7
• Captain Lavender by Medbh McGuckian
  Gallery, 83 pp, £11.95, November 1994, ISBN 1 85235 142 X

In Irish poetry, from Ó Rathaille to the rebel songs, a paradigmatic encounter recurs. Up on a hill, or down by the glenside, the poet meets a woman who celebrates Ireland’s pastand speaks of national redemption. This emblematic figure, often glimpsed in a vision or ‘aisling’, can be a glamorous maiden awaiting her Stuart prince, but she also appears as the ‘poor old woman’ of the patriotic ballads. Whether praising the sacrifices of ‘the bold Fenian men’ or complaining (after 1921) of the bondage which shackles one of her ‘four green fields’, this plangent yet bloodthirsty crone is as worn a cultural token as those related feminine stereotypes, Dark Rosaleen and Cathleen Ní Houlihan. In the rapidly modernising Ireland of satellite TV and legalised divorce, she might seem an exhausted figment. Remarkably, however, the Shan Van Vocht keeps cropping up in verse, as though poets hoped that renewed encounters could release the energies still locked in archaic nationalism, and clarify relations between patriotic sentiment and sexual politics.