Making the Argument : OBJECT LESSONS: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, <i> By Eavan Boland (W.W. Norton: $23; 272 pp.)</i>

A university student sat down at a table in a room in Dublin, and wrote her first poems in a copybook. “But one thing was lacking,” she informs us. “There were times when I sat down at that table, or came up the stairs, my keys in my hand, to open the door well after midnight, when I missed something. I wanted a story. I wanted to read or hear the narrative of someone else--a woman and a poet--who had gone here, and been there, who had lifted a kettle to a gas stove. Who had set her skirt out over a chair, near to the clothes dryer, to have it without creases for the morning. Who had made the life meet the work and had set it down: the difficulties and the rewards; the senses of lack. I remember thinking that it need not be perfect or important. Just there; just available.”

That engaging young woman now is the accomplished, much-discussed Irish poet Eavan Boland. Remembering the girl she was in the early 1960s, she offers us the story of life and work that was lacking and tells it in a most sensible and necessary way: not as memoir, but as poetic argument.

What form will a poetic argument take? A well-constructed argument in poetry will not be necessarily about metrics or verse-form; rather, I think it will be closer to what Robert Hass calls “the shape of its understanding.” The shape of its understanding, I propose, is also the proper form of the poetic argument. The premise of Boland’s argument (the word is hers, and her vigorous argument is well-known in Ireland) is this: “[O]ver a relatively short time--certainly no more than a generation or two--women have moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them. It is a momentous transit. It is also a disruptive one. . . . What is more, such a transit . . . is almost invisible to the naked eye. Critics may well miss it or map it inaccurately.”

Thoughtfully, Boland recounts the long, uncertain process by which she came to construct (as any poet must) a persona: how she grew out of that well-schooled girl with an unsettled past and a well-received early book, into herself, a wife and mother residing in a Dublin suburb, beginning to write poems of another kind. She rehearses how in fits and starts she undertook to carry the elements of her “suburban life” into her poetry. Not, she qualifies, “that my poetry expressed the suburb. The more accurate version is that my poetry allowed me to experience it.” She wanted to carry her subject into Irish poetry, to claim her part in its political yet private history; and there she ran into trouble.

Her situation as a young poet was particularly acute, for, as she read it, Irish history was one of “defeat,” made “mythical” by poets whose authority was bestowed by the “nationalist” culture, and was formed from “public”--that is, male, war-based, often violent--experience. She saw how in this tradition women were the “silenced” objects of poetic discourse: the nurturing mother, the saintly wife, the suffering old lady, Dark Rosaleen: Ireland as (objectified) Woman.

Boland writes of her domestic life with tact. She does not name her people, nor simply transfer them into print; rather, all are made into allusive presences, and become part of her aesthetic. That diplomatic cast gives her argument (and for me, her poetry) wider resonance. She will surely speak persuasively to many more of us beyond her borders, persons of varied national, tribal and gendered backgrounds, who have had to learn lessons not dissimilar to hers.

For she is strict about the nature of the poet’s authority and the rigorous demands of the poem on its maker: “The temptation is to honor the power of poetry and forget that hinterland where you lived for so long, without a sound in your throat, without a syllable at your command.” She is accurate, too, about the dangers seducing young poets: the “growth of control over language”; the “illusion” of isolation (“it turns an act of language into a sense of power”); unearned authority; and the mistaken source of authority, which can accrue “too much power to the speaker to allow that speaker to be himself a plausible critic of power.”

Here is Eavan Boland’s shaping: not linear, but a graceful circling back to, and amplifying, recurring images of herself as a young woman studying the history of her art, working into her own form; and in the process discovering that, as a woman poet, she had no authority in Irish poetry, and could presume none. That is, she discovered there was no “permission”--neither by the nation or by its poetry--given a woman to be the subject, let alone the author, of her poems. Therefore, she had to investigate the premises and history of the Irish poem, to find that place where she could enter it. That place proved to be just where, she argues, the structure of the Irish poem has changed.

Boland tells us how she declined to let poetry defeat women twice. She undertook an onerous triple-duty: having learned the work of making her poems, she had next to (re)construct the invisible, excluded world around them, because they carried few referents inside the traditional, given poetic discourse. Then, as in “Object Lessons,” she had to narrate the process of that (re)construction. That hard duty, she writes, is part of a “sequence of . . . permissions for the Irish poem: . . . It was still weighed, as many post-colonial instruments are, by a burden of proof: So that the oppression could be further disproved, the oppressed must be proved worthy over and over again.”

And so, it seems, they must too often still be proved. Her discussion of the necessary politicizing of the woman poet is supple and exacting. Her emphasis falls equally on poet and woman. “The final effect of the political poem depends,” she points out, “on whether it is viewed by the reader as an act of freedom or an act of power. This in turn has everything to do with the authority of the speaker.” That authority grows as the speaker is “weakened and made vulnerable by the tensions she creates.” She is unyielding about this; as in all poetry, “The mover of the poem’s action--the voice, the speaker--must be at the same risk from that action as every other component in the poem.”

All this has been the well-mapped groundwork of her imagination. Her argument leaps, I thought, when she considers the woman poet, her sexuality, the erotic in poetry and her reclamation of eros as sensuality. Deftly, she examines that “powerful sing” in which are joined the sexual and the erotic, and which is “responsible for the beauty of the erotic object in the poem. But also for its silence and agelessness.” Artfully, she shows us how she came to understand the erotic poem as a “drama of expression,” rather than a “drama of desire”; how that expressive drama had not only an aesthetic, but also a complex ethical dimension; and how she was engaged by those dimensions. Finally, her commentary on works by four women poets offers what was, for me, an unexpected reward, as I reread two of them, at least, with a new appreciation.

Eavan Boland has made an honest book and written of intricate matters courteously. My copy is heavily marked at passages I applaud, or wish we would speak further about, or even disagree about; she has let me feel the talk would be lively and as well-considered as the writing. She has proposed to her reader a composed, level-headed, yet spirited argument, welcome in a hard time when argument in our public life has come to behave more like aggression.