Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida.

It is not uncommon for poets to write poems about the art of writing poems, or about other poets, especially those they admire. In the category of light verse, where humor and sarcasm predominate, poems about people they despise are often common.

But today’s piece by Irish poet Eavan Borland is definitely a case of strong admiration, for a poet I have also always admired. First we’ll talk about Anne Bradstreet, the woman who is the subject of the poem.

Bradstreet, who lived from 1612 until 1672 CE, was the first person residing in the Americas to become recognized and published as a poet. This was at a time when just getting to the Colonies was perilous, and life there was harsh, at best. Being sent to the Colonies as a punishment was considered by some to be the equivalent of a death sentence.

We have several of her works online at theotherpages.org (https://theotherpages.org/poems/poem-ab.html#bradstreet) (we should definitely have more; I’ll work on that over the summer).

That she lived to age sixty was quite uncommon for her time and place. That she became a poet, and managed to get her works published in England, makes her unique for the times. Particularly unique, when you realize that, in the Puritanical culture of Colonial Massachusetts, writing was considered a highly improper activity for a woman. The headwinds against her were considerable.

Eavan Borland (who was born in 1944 in Dublin, and died there in 2020), was a professor-in-residence at Stanford University from 1996 onward, and split her time between California and Ireland. She wrote many poems, essays, and pieces of literary criticism. Much of her writing focused on the everyday lives of women, and the hurdles they faced in a male-dominated society, something that Anne Bradstreet herself would have no-doubt appreciated, although she also took on painful topics including domestic violence, in common with Wednesday’s piece by Maria Nazos.

Today’s short poem, Becoming Anne Bradstreet,  is a meditation by Borland on what it must have been like to be Anne Bradstreet, and the kinship she feels towards her, and understanding of what she must have gone through in life. Each time she reads Bradstreet’s poems, according to her own poem, she feels hope and optimism, and a connectedness:

Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet's coast.

A blackbird leaves her pine trees

And lands in my spruce trees.

I open my door on a Dublin street.

Her child/her words are staring up at me

Boats sailing the Irish Sea (that’s Mare Hibernicum in Latin) visible from Dublin, can be sailed all the way to American shores.

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