Eavan Boland — Eviction

Poetry Unbound

On Being Studios

Relationships, Society & Culture, Spirituality, Arts, Religion & Spirituality, Books

4.9 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2021

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This poem offers critique into a moment of Irish history when Ireland, through independence, was rising to the light. But Irish women were facing lives as constricted in independence as under empire. Decades later, Eavan Boland reads a newspaper of her grandmother’s near-eviction and is consumed both by rage and critique of how history concerns itself with the politics of men, not women. This poem is a corrective, turning the gaze on historians, as well as history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Podrigotuma and one of the things that poetry does is it preserves stories.
0:08.8	Sometimes those stories are the huge stories of the day or of history, other times their
0:13.2	personal stories.
0:14.8	And so paying attention to the small ways within which a particular poem can disrupt
0:22.0	a big telling of an old history, of Ireland's say, of Ireland's independence.
0:27.0	I have always loved finding poems that take a different beginning point and begin
0:32.0	to pull apart a thread of a story to say maybe it wasn't all like that.
0:38.4	Eviction by Ivan Boland
0:46.7	Back from Dublin, my grandmother finds an eviction notice on her door.
0:52.7	Now she is in court for rent arrears.
0:56.8	The lawyers are amused.
0:59.5	These are the petty sessions.
1:02.4	This is Drahada, this is the bank holiday.
1:06.1	Their comments fill a column in the newspaper.
1:10.4	Was the notice well served?
1:12.6	Was it served at all?
1:14.3	Is she a weekly or a monthly tenant?
1:18.5	In which one of the plaintiffs rent books is she registered?
1:23.3	The case comes to an end, is dismissed, leaving behind the autumn evening.
1:30.3	Leaving behind the room she entered.
1:33.7	Leaving behind the reason I have always resisted history.
1:38.7	A woman leaves a courtroom in tears, a nation is rising to the light.
	...

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