In this text, Eavan Boland meditates on being a woman and a poet in modern Ireland. In prose, she talks about the challenges of speaking honestly and truly in Ireland - where to be a woman (especially a surburban married woman with children) and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. Boland focuses on "obstinate details" that represent larger meanings. The autobiography is not confessional, the facts connect with other voices, other lives. She is uneasy with Modernism and concerned with the erotic. A sense of continuities mark the book, the portrait of a critical imagination moving among history's obstacles, finding itself in the lessons of objects and poems.

Object Sessions - The Life of the Womanand the Poet in Our Time

BOLAND, Eavan

Biographies & Memoirs

Vintage

A new collection of poems about marriage by one of our most celebrated poets. These powerful poems are written against the perfections and idealizations of traditional love poetry. The man and woman in these poems are husband and wife, custodians of ordinary, aging human love. They are not figures in a love poem. Time is their essential witness, and not their destroyer.

Against Love Poetry: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

W.W.Norton&Company

Poems deal with experiences of Irish women in love, marriage, motherhood, and modern society

Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

In a Time of Violence

A collection of poetry about Ireland, the body, and growing older features the violence of each, how they relate, and how they affect the identity of the self as a woman. By the author of Outside History.

In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.

Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

Arts & Literature

Gathers selections from the poet's first five books that illuminate the tensions between literary and suburban lives as well as the entanglement of language, being, and substance

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987

Merging private and mythic history, this collection of poems from the acclaimed Irish poet is a private account of her deep feelings for her lost land, Ireland.

The Lost Land: Poems

An eloquent series of linked essays about the poetic enterprise from "one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century" (Poetry Review). "This is a book of being and becoming. It is about being a poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one," writes Eavan Boland. These inspiring essays are both critical and deeply personal, allowing the adventure, passion, and struggle of becoming a woman poet to be viewed from different perspectives. Boland traces her own experiences as a woman, wife, and mother and their effects on her poetry. In the opening essay, she explores the story of her mother, a painter, and her influence on Boland's own concepts of art and womanhood. She examines the work of women poets such as Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath, whose poetry provided light and guidance for her own work. And finally, in "Letter to a Young Woman Poet," she addresses an unseen young poet of the future, and looks to a world where this future artist can change the poetic past as well as the present.

A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

Domestic Violence: Poems

“A poet at the peak of her power . . . one of Ireland’s greatest, and among the best writing in English anywhere.”―Booklist These are poems about the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur. A marriage is a window for outward violence; a painted cup becomes a theater for a long love; in an ordinary room a mythic violation takes place.

An expansive, celebratory collection from “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” (Poetry Review).An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967–1987 confirmed Eavan Boland’s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.

New Collected Poems

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Books by BOLAND, Eavan