Ekphrasis and the ethics of exchange in Eavan Boland's Domestic Violence

Abstract

This essay considers how ekphrasis in Eavan Boland's most recent volume of poetry, Domestic Violence, challenges contemporary assumptions about the abstract, antagonistic nature of ekphrasis. By taking ekphrasis out the museum context, her poetry explores how the dynamic between art and spatial context outside of the museum — in the newspaper, at the kitchen table, at the excavation site — recovers areas of meaning based on relational exchange that are often obscured in the modern gallery setting. Boland's liminal position between poetic and visual space charges ekphrastic exchange with ethical, potentially transformative significance, and challenges the antagonistic post-Romantic power struggle that dominates theories about the relationship between writing and the visual arts. The title phrase of the volume, “domestic violence,” suggests the inter-art conflict often characteristic of ekphrasis — as well as the domestic conflict on so many different levels in Ireland — but the immediacy of the term also suggests the need for change, a necessary intervention, and at best the re-imagining of a relationship. Boland's ekphrasis re-imagines the relationship between word and image just as she re-evaluates her own relation to violence in Ireland. Boland's continual reimagining of the ethical space her poetry inhabits has allowed her work to challenge a long tradition of abstracting the ekphrastic situation from its ethical roots and affirms the continued power of ekphrasis as a mode of poetic imagination capable of responding to real suffering faced by individuals and communities in Ireland and beyond.