Walking Through Light-Filled Rooms In 'Woman Without A Country'
And Boland treasures single words as if she were contemplating the facets of jewels: some poems' exercises in etymology are akin to slipping on a necklace. "Nostalgia" contemplates the linguistic heritage of the word "cobbler," while the magnificent "Song and Error" muses on the translation of the reason Ovid gave for his banishment from Rome, before pulling back into a breath-taking perspective on language's capacity to colonize. It's masterful work.
The stand-out sequence for me was "A Woman Without a Country;" the dedication alone had me in tears:
This sequence is dedicated to those who lost a country, not by history or inheritance, but through a series of questions to which they could find no answer.
Laced with prose sections titled in numbered "Lessons," it's a powerful mediation between the vast and the small. The poems move from grand ideas of nation to a single woman's life, blurring the reality of which is vast and which is small, and questioning whether that distance between idea and existence can be bridged. This is a passage from "Anonymity," a poem that invites the reader to walk "from room to room" in a museum:
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Powerless queens; stock-still, enslaved
Girls at the entryway to anonymity.
Women without a country
Assembled from the treasures of a country:
A finger of silver. A mineral breast.
An ear poured out in bronze.
I have felt broken open by Boland's language before, most keenly by passages in her "Letter to a young woman poet." In it she remembers how "the poets I knew were not women: the women I knew were not poets. The conversations I had, or wanted to have, were never complete."
I felt, reading A Woman Without a Country, that I was having a conversation — that beautiful kind of conversation where you can't nod enthusiastically enough, where each speaker articulates the other's thoughts as quickly as they occur, where you feel energized and elated and full of new understanding of each other and the world.
I'm profoundly grateful for it.
Amal El-Mohtar is the author of The Honey Month and the editor of Goblin Fruit, an online poetry magazine.