When Eavan Boland captured ordinariness in her poetry, it often slipped into something mythical
nights were warm, Eavan Boland liked to stand in the front doorway of her small suburban house in Dundrum, outside Dublin. She would look at the buddleia, and at the lamplight glossing the leaves of the hedge. Yet these things were not simply visible to her. She saw them with her body.
Her days now revolved round cooking, washing up, nappies, feeds; lifting the kettle to the gas stove, setting her skirt over a chair to have it without creases for the morning. They were full of small untidinesses and oversights which assumed huge importance, like the loaf forgotten by the cash register, or washing left wet. They were full, too, of hidden satisfactions: a row of cups winking on their saucers, a copper pan well polished, fresh green celery feathers.
Yet the all-too-ordinary often slipped into something else. She was too deeply read in the myths and epics of Ireland for it to be otherwise. The life that was lived in a brick house could still have a visionary quality. In “Night Feed”, she noticed not only the rosy zipped sleeper, the hard suckling, the silt of milk left in the bottle, but the movements of earth and stars, and the “long fall from grace” as the feed ended.
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