Eavan Boland’s Domestic Interiors or How “The Ordinary” Started to Matter in Irish Poetry

Abstract

Eavan Boland, one of the most prominent contemporary Irish poets, very often uses autobiographical details in her poetry. This is especially significant for her 1982 collection, Night Feed, in which Boland largely identifies with lyric subjects who are almost always suburban mothers/wives/housewives. Things and details by which Boland‟s women are surrounded within domestic space (baby‟s bottles, nappies, toys, dirty laundry, dishes, remnants of food, etc.), very ordinary and mundane at first sight, provide the poet with a rich material for writing poetry. The imagery which is traditionally considered rather trivial and not poetic enough enters her poems conveying stories of the totally neglected life of many contemporary (Irish) women. This paper focuses on the ways in which Boland conveys domestic interiors, and its aim is to demonstrate how in her poetry interior space turns into a poetic world with its own significance that is not less important than the outside urban or rural spaces inscribed in the poetry of other poets. Keywords: Eavan Boland, domestic interior, suburb, trivial, ordinary.