My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art (review)

My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art, edited by Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, pp. 163. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. $45 cloth; $19.95 paper

Patricia Boyle Haberstroh's new book, My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art purports to be a volume of essays in which Irish women poets confront and define their muses, figures traditionally female who in history have inspired male poets by acting as their "helpmate[s] in translating experience into art." This struggle against traditional and gender-bound constructions of the artist often forces women writers to write themselves, to become their own subjects after centuries of suffering as objects for the male gaze. This collection--with a representative poem and essay by nine Irish women poets-- contains several essays that should be read and reread as testaments to the changing current of contemporary Irish poetry.

Haberstroh's own introductory essay nicely lays the groundwork for the collection; it is revealing that the editor returns continually to the idea of identity for the women writers--political, gender, national, artistic. This is her real subject, and the subject of most of the essays, rather than the notion that women writers must "see themselves as their own muse." Influence, rather than inspiration, better describes these women's subjects.

The first essay in the book, "Nuns: A Subject for a Woman Writer," traces the influence of these pledged yet free women in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's family history on her own writing. Ní Chuilleanáin realizes that as a writer, she is drawn to nuns' "long past of silence and turning away from the world, to my own memories of hospitality and humor, to the image it offers of a community of women interacting with formality and grace, to the seriousness and passion that was the source for all the sisters' work." Likewise, Mary O'Malley's essay places her early influences at the heart of her current goals as a poet:

Since history and story were very close relations for me, I take that to include personal history. Since I grew up with a very real and local mythos that arose out of the ritual activities of the place I lived in, myth was the more powerful and less subjective of the two. . . . Put simply, I am anchored or held up by the truth of certain metaphors that seem to me to enter poems when the time is right and the shape of the poem demands them.

The essays by Eavan Boland and Moya Cannon most fully express Haberstroh's stated objective, and are also the essays that seem to look beyond even the confines of a "subject" to speak of poetry as a living entity. Cannon's essay relates poetry--enjoyment of it and the making of it--to music. Her own early readings of poets showed her the "hammered beauty of their music," and as she began to write she found her own music:

What has been spat out should not be mistaken for poetry, yet, in the early stages of writing, we are so relieved to have externalized our turmoil that we often do so. It is generally only the raw material of poetry. But once it has been literally ex-pressed and externalized, it is possible to cast about for the images which will make sense of it. It is only through the medium of image and rhythm that communication and consequently poetry happen.

As in music, tension arises and is resolved through the interplay of elements. What perhaps begins in chaos often ends in a kind of quiet.

What "happened" for Moya Cannon as she continued to write is that she discovered the musical qualities of language itself. While studying history, she

found it exceedingly difficult to live with the implication that truth was relative and temporary. Again it was the felt evidence of...