The Singers

1995 Guest introduction THE SINGERS forM.R.* The women who were singers in the West lived on an unforgiving coast. I want to ask was there ever one moment when all of it relented— when rain and ocean and their own sense of home were revealed to them as one and the same? After which every day was still shaped by weather, but every night their mouths filled with Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars and exhausted birds? And only when the danger was plain in the music could you know the measure of their true rejoicing in finding a voice where they found a vision. from Eavan Boland, In a Time of Violence: W.W. Norton, 1994. Reprinted with permission of W.W.Norton (U.S.A.) and Carcanet Press Ltd. (United Kingdom). * This poem was dedicated to Irish President Mary Robinson, who quoted the last line in her inaugural address. ...