THE SUNDAY POEM:

Every week Ruth Padel discusses a contemporary poet through an example of their work.

'That the Science of Cartography is Limited' by Eavan Boland

-and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads as this to build.

Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.


Born Dublin 1944, a younger contemporary of Longley and Mahon, has written much on the problems facing women poets in a male-dominated environment. Over eight collections, her developing forms and subjects - the fabric of domestic life, myth, love, history, and Irish rural landscape - to have kept their commitment to lyric grace and feminism.

Boland expands sideways her powerful central image, the "famine roads" which British rulers asked the starving Irish to build. These roads were, and are literally, pointless; they end where the road builders died. Intellectualising them into meditations on mapmaking, personalising them with memories of early days with a partner, she positions the poem's voice politically, emotionally and gender-wise. It comes from a woman told things by a man (look down you said; you told me); an Irish poet remembering one of the worst catastrophes of Irish history; and a thinker, meditating on cartography. Brian Friel's play Translations showed the British mapping of Ireland as a "translation" of Irish reality through language and naming. Geographical mapping translates physical reality in a way which you can also interpret as imperialist and sexist. The rendering of the spherical as flat is a design which persuades a curve into a plane. The language is about power; but also about seduction: about ingenious control of something sweet-smelling (the fragrance of balsam), sad (the gloom of cypresses) and curved (the globe, women). The poem defiantly musters its images towards the thought that this masterful design is "limited. The line will not be there. Maps cannot show hunger, desperation, or any feeling (like being in love).

For this poem about the failure of constraint, she chooses a form which is - from the first word which follows on grammatically from the title - deliberately unconstrained. It jostles a lecturing formality (that science is limited is what I wish to prove) up against the emotive when you and I were first in love: it also disappears proper grammar into the ambiguously related lines of the third and fourth stanzas, just as rough-cast stone disappears into scutch grass. These stanzas, whose lack of punctuation signals freedom from rules or rulers, have no connective word between their two main verbs. The second crucial one is Relief Committees gave. The first is I looked down at ivy. If Boland were keeping syntactic rules, she'd have a full stop after told me. Not having one means in the second winter seems to refer to the moment when the stone disappears into the grass. But that winter, in 1847, when the crop failed twice, was really when the men fell and their bodies disappeared into the ground. Both disappearances, stone and men, are marked by the disappearance of regulation syntax. At the point where the road disappears, map-making is limited, and syntax fails too.

Though the form is deliberately free of convention (many poets would avoid line-ends like in, of, had, of), Boland knits the stanzas together with traditional techniques of vowel-resonance and patterns of consonants: a ballet of long O, D and V (of, prove, love, drove, road and gave), the echo of grass in rough-cast, of apt in flat; a patchwork of long I and A in plane, again, line, cries, pine and finds. But even this traditional musical patterning falls away at the end to make the central point: that every attempt at recording, or translating, the most important human experiences, fails. Just as her central image, the unfinished and appallingly unnecessary road trails away into nothing, a lost record of people's lost effort and lives, so the poem moves from a dash, a hyphen, to the words will not be there - and silence. The poem itself is its own only record of the suffering that is not there on the map of this island.