Leif Schenstead-Harris University of Western Ontario, Department of English Presentation: ACLA 2013, Toronto April 2013 Written with a Ghost Hand: Eavan Boland’s Spectropoetics Who moves the scribe’s hand so that it will pass into the actuality of writing? According to what laws does the transition from the possible to the real take place? Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency” It will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women” The word “ghost”—or even “haunted,” for that matter—does not often appear in indices, though it does creep its way into titles and metaphors. We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, hauntings do not occupy any fixed position or have their own discursive fields. They are, in the end, reminders of the emptiness of signifiers and the lost commonality of language. 1 Ghosts recur across contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland’s work: they appear as a kind of weeping in “The Colonists” (1998), a figure of her experience as a stranger living in Iowa in “Ghost Stories” (1990), and a name for the lyric voice in “What Love Intended” (1990), amid numerous other references across her critical and biographical writings. These writings both articulate her vexed relationship with inherited literary traditions and, in creative counterpoint, sketch a series of influential women writers from Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Mew to Anne Bradstreet and Sylvia Plath. Boland’s quarrel with tradition, representation, and poetry is often thought to emerge from her feminist or postcolonial stance. 2 However, beneath these challenges to discursive objects of power—a relentlessly masculine literary tradition and the influences of Schenstead-Harris 1