POET

Eavan Boland (1944 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Over the course of a career that began in the early 1960s, when she was a young wife in Dublin, Eavan Boland has emerged as one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. Describing those formative years in an interview with Jody Allen Randolph in Colby Quarterly (later included on the Web site of her publisher, Carcanet Press), Boland said, "I began that time watching milk being taken in metal churns, on horse and cart, towards the city center. And I ended it as a married woman, in a flat on Raglan Road, watching this ghostly figure of a man walking on the moon. I suppose I began the decade in a city which Joyce would have recognized, and ended it in one that would have bewildered him."

During this time, Boland honed an appreciation for the ordinary in life, an appreciation reflected in the title of her 2001 collection, Against Love Poetry. "So much of European love poetry," she told Alice Quinn of the New Yorker online, "is court poetry, coming out of the glamorous traditions of the court. . . . Love poetry, from the troubadours on, is traditionally about that romantic lyric moment. There's little about the ordinariness of love." Seeking a poetry that would express the beauty of the plain things that make up most people's existences, she found that she would have to create it for herself. It is "dailiness," as Boland called it, that reviewers often find, and praise, in Boland's poetry. Frank Allen, in a Library Journal review of Against Love Poetry, wrote, "This volume . . . dramatizes conflicts between marriage and freedom ('what is hidden in / this ordinary, aging human love')."

Certainly, "conflicts between marriage and freedom" is a feminist theme, and though Boland has been described as a feminist, her approach is not an overtly political one. Perhaps this is because she is not content, as a poet, to uphold one view of things to the exclusion of all others: hers is a voice, in the words of Melanie Rehak in the New York Times Book Review, "that is by now famous for its unwavering feminism as well as its devotion to both the joys of domesticity and her native Ireland."

Acknowledgement for Boland's work has been long in coming, but as Randolph noted, that recognition has arrived, and in a big way. Irish students wishing to graduate from secondary school must undergo a series of examinations for what is called the "leaving certificate." The writings of great national poets such as Seamus Heaney are a mandatory part of the leaving exam, and since 1999, would-be graduates are required to undergo examinations in Boland's work as well.

CAREER

Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, lecturer; School of Irish Studies, Dublin, lecturer; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and director of creative writing program. Has taught at University College, Dublin, at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, at the University of Utah, and as Hurst Professor at Washington University, St. Louis, 1993. Participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program, 1979.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• 23 Poems, Gallagher (Dublin, Ireland), 1962.
• Autumn Essay, Gallagher (Dublin, Ireland), 1963.
• New Territory, Allen Figgis & Co. (Dublin, Ireland), 1967.
• The War Horse, Gollancz (London, England), 1975.
• In Her Own Image, Arlen House (Dublin, Ireland), 1980.
• Introducing Eavan Boland, Ontario Review Press (New York, NY), 1981.
• Night Feed, M. Boyars (Boston, MA), 1982.
• The Journey, Deerfield Press (Deerfield, MA), 1983.
• The Journey and Other Poems, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1987.
• Selected Poems, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1989.
• Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990, Norton (New York, NY), 1990.
• In a Time of Violence, Norton (New York, NY), 1994.
• A Dozen Lips, Attic Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1994.
• A Christmas Chalice, State University of New York at Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), 1994.
• Collected Poems, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1995, published as An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems, 1967-1987, Norton (New York, NY), 1996.
• Anna Liffey, Poetry Ireland (Dublin, Ireland), 1997.
• Limitations, Center for the Book Arts (New York, NY), 2000.
• Against Love Poetry, Norton (New York, NY), 2001.
• Journey with Two Maps: An Anthology, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 2002.

Work represented in anthologies, including The Observer Arvon Poetry Collection, Guardian Newspapers (London, England), 1994; Penguin Modern Poets, Penguin (London, England), 1995; To Persephone, Wesleyan University Press with the New England Foundation for the Arts (Hanover, NH), 1996; The Norton Anthology of Poetry, edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, Norton, 1998; American's Favorite Poems, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, Norton, 1999; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, Norton, 1999; The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang, Norton, 2000; The Longman Anthology of Women's Literature, edited by Mary K. Deshazer, Longman, 2000; The Norton Introduction to Literature, eighth edition, edited by J. Paul Hunter, Alison Booth, and Kelly J. Mays, Norton, 2001; and The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Cenbury, edited by David Damrosch, Addison-Wesley Longman, 2002; and Faber Anthology of Irish Verse, Penguin Anthology of Irish Verse, Pan Anthology of Irish Verse, and Sphere Anthology of Irish Verse.

OTHER

• (With Michael MacLiammoir) W. B. Yeats and His World, Thames & Hudson (London, England), 1971, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1986.
• The Emigrant Irish, The British Council (London, England), 1986.
• A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition, Attic Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1989.
• (With Aileen MacKeogh and Brian P. Kennedy) House, Dublin Project (Dublin, Ireland), 1991.
• Gods Make Their Own Importance: The Authority of the Poet in Our Time, Society Productions (London, England), 1994.
• Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, Norton (New York, NY), 1995.
• (With Harriet Levin) The Christmas Show, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1997.
• (Editor, with John Hollander) Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1997.
• The Lost Land, W. W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 1998.
• (Editor, with Mark Strand) The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Norton (New York, NY), 2000.
• (Editor, with J. D. McClatchy), Horace, the Odes, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2002.

Regular contributor to Irish Times. Contributor to Irish Press, Spectator, American Poetry Review, and Soundings.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, introduction by Edmund Morris, Random House (New York, NY), 1999.
• Boland, Eavan, In a Time of Violence, Norton (New York, NY), 1995.
• Boland, Eavan, An Origin like Water, Norton (New York, NY), 1997.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 40, 1986, Volume 67, 1992.
• Coyne, J. Stirling and N. P. Willis, Scenery and Antiquitites of Ireland, Virtue (London, England), 1840.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.
• Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle, Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1996.
• Joyce, Weston St. John, The Neighborhood of Dublin, M. H. Gill & Son (Dublin, Ireland), 1939.
• Yeats, W. B., Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan (London, England), 1936.

PERIODICALS

• American Poetry Review, September, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 7.
• Bloomsbury Review, March, 1998, review of Object Lessons, p. 22.
• Booklist, March 15, 1994, p. 1322; February 15, 1996, p. 983; October 15, 1998, review of The Lost Land, p. 389; March 15, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 1276.
• Commonweal, November 4, 1988, p. 595.
• Entertainment Weekly, January 15, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 58.
• Hudson Review, August, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 507.
• Irish Literary Supplement, fall, 1994, p. 23; fall, 1995, p. 8; spring, 1996, p. 30; spring 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 15.
• Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 1998, review of The Lost Land, p. 1492.
• Library Journal, November 15, 1990, p. 74; March 1, 1994, p. 90; July, 2001, Frank Allen, review of Against Love Poetry, pp. 94-95.
• Nation, June 6, 1994, p. 798; April 24, 1995, p. 564.
• New Statesman & Society, January 26, 1996, p. 40.
• New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994, p. 25.
• New York Times Book Review, April 21, 1991, p. 40; November 4, 2001, Melanie Rehak, "Map of Love."
• Poetry, July, 1990, p. 236; October, 1994, p. 41; February, 1998, review of An Origin Like Water, p. 282.
• Publishers Weekly, October 26, 1990, p. 62; December 18, 1995, p. 51; August 31, 1998, review of The Lost Land, p. 69.
• Southern Review, spring, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 387.
• Times Literary Supplement, August 5, 1994, p. 19; September 8, 1995, p. 28; December 10, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 23.
• Women's Review of Books, September, 1995, p. 7; April, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 17.
• Yale Review, July, 1999, review of The Lost Land, p. 167.

OTHER

• Academy of American Poets Web Site, http://www.poets.org/ (September 18, 2001), "Eavan Boland."
• Carcanet Press Web site, http://www.carcanet.co.uk/ (October 16, 2002), Jody Allen Randolph, "A Backward Look: An Interview with Eavan Boland."
• Skoool.ie Interactive Learning, http://www.skoool.ie/ (October 16, 2002), "Eavan Boland."
• New Yorker Web site, http://www.newyorker.com/ (October 29, 2001), Alice Quinn, "Q&A: The Stoicisms of Love" (interview with Eavan Boland).