Eavan Boland

Irish poet, author, and academic.

• Born: September 24, 1944
• Place of Birth: Dublin, Ireland

• Place of birth: Dublin, Ireland

Biography

By the mid-1980s, Eavan Boland had become one of Ireland’s most significant poets. Her themes have included an awareness of herself as Irish and Ireland’s painful history, as well as a consciousness of her role as a woman in her functions as a writer, wife, and mother.

Boland’s early life was influenced by her father’s position as Irish ambassador to the court of St. James in London. In London, she attended convent school until she was twelve. There, she first became sensitive to being an Irish living in the country of Ireland’s colonial rulers. Her education continued in another convent school in New York City, where her sense of dislocation and exile intensified.

In 1962, the same year she graduated from Holy Child Convent School in Killiney, County Dublin, Boland published her first pamphlet of poems. From 1962 to 1966, she attended Trinity College, Dublin, where she graduated with first-class honors in English. She briefly became a junior lecturer in English at Trinity, but although she enjoyed teaching, she found an academic career incompatible with her writing. After that, she limited her academic roles to intermittent terms as a lecturer or poet in residence until the 1990s, when she would take a position at Stanford University. In 1969, she married the novelist Kevin Casey, with whom she had two daughters, Sarah Margaret, born in 1975, and Eavan Frances, born in 1978.

In New Territory (1967), Boland’s first substantive book of poems, she begins to formulate some of the themes that were to remain important to her. In particular, she is interested in the function of art. In her next volume, The War Horse (1975), Boland begins to come into her maturity, as reflected in the way she treats Ireland’s tragic history in poems such as “The Famine Road” and “A Soldier’s Son.” Boland’s following volume, In Her Own Image (1980), contains poems that articulate women’s concerns, including anorexia, mastectomy, and domestic violence. Some reviewers suggested that Boland examines the entire nature of femaleness in this collection. The image she uses of a woman before a mirror and the mask of cosmetics suggests how the world forces women to hide their true selves. In 1981, The War Horse and In Her Own Image were published in the United States in a collected volume titled Introducing Eavan Boland, establishing her reputation in that country and introducing her work to American readers.

Boland’s next collection, Night Feed (1982), focuses on the human relationships that make up home life, particularly her own relationships as a mother with two small daughters. Most readers understand that Boland intends to use the details of home life to concretely express her perceptions about human relationships.

Boland has discussed the presence of the woman poet in Irish writing at some length. Her perception of her own writing in the Irish tradition is a significant element in her self-understanding. That perception demands an acknowledgment of the tragic violence of Irish history under British rule, of the catastrophe of the Great Famine, and the bloodshed during Britain’s control of Northern Ireland. In her comments about the genesis of her poem “Achill Woman,” Boland explains the interrelationship of these themes. The poem refers to when she went to the isolated Achill district to prepare for university examinations. During her solitary time there, an old country woman explained how hundreds had died in that district during the Famine. It was the first time Boland had confronted this part of Ireland’s past.

Her awareness of her country’s suffering under famine and the repressions of colonial rule are significant themes in her In a Time of Violence (1994), in which her poems dramatize such historical events as the coffin ships carrying Irish immigrants to America and incidents in Ireland’s struggle for independence. In the long poem “Anna Liffey,” Boland expresses her identification with the river Liffey, which runs through Dublin; she concludes, “The body is a source. Nothing more.” What is most important to Boland is that she is a voice; with that assertion she ends the poem. In The Lost Land (1998), Boland continues exploring the issues and emotions of exile and colonial victimhood. These are especially the burdens of “Colony,” a significant poem that makes up the book's first half. Boland’s artistry and her personal and public authority make this poetry collection a pinnacle of her career.

Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995) collects several autobiographical pieces and essays on the place of women in Ireland’s poetry. Essays such as “Outside History” and “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma” articulate the history of Boland’s coming to feminism, her recognition of the special courage women must find to pursue their art, and the need for their work to give voice to the lives of the women who went before them, mothers and grandmothers whose lives were outside history.

Boland’s works in the twenty-first century include the pamphlet Limitations (2000), published in celebration of a reading by Boland at the Center for Book Arts in New York City, as well as the poetry collections Against Love Poetry (2001), Code (2001), New Collected Poems (2005, 2008), Domestic Violence (2007), and A Woman without a Country (2014). A Poet's Dublin (2016), edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, collects Boland's various poems about Dublin over the years, along with forty-five photographs of the city. Her prose collection A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2011), which tells the story of her development as a writer, won the 2012 PEN Award for creative nonfiction. She also edited several anthologies and other works in the 2000s, including The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000, with Mark Strand), Irish Writers on Writing (2007); Charlotte Mew: Selected Poems (2008), and The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008, with Ed Hirsch), among others. In 2020, Boland published her final poetry collection, The Historians: Poems.

Boland joined the Stanford University English faculty in 1996. In 2016, she was one of six Stanford professors elected to that year's class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Boland served as the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor and director of Stanford’s creative writing program until she died in 2020 at 75. 

Author Works

Poetry:

23 Poems, 1962

Autumn Essay, 1963

Eavan Boland Poetry / Prose Joseph O'Malley, 1963

New Territory, 1967

The War Horse, 1975

In Her Own Image, 1980

Introducing Eavan Boland, 1981 (reprint of The War Horse and In Her Own Image)

Night Feed, 1982

The Journey and Other Poems, 1986

Selected Poems, 1989

Outside History, 1990

In a Time of Violence, 1994

Collected Poems, 1995 (pb. in US as An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems, 1967–1987, 1996)

The Lost Land, 1998

Limitations, 2000 (pamphlet)

Against Love Poetry, 2001

Code, 2001

New Collected Poems, 2005, 2008

Domestic Violence, 2007

A Woman without a Country, 2014

A Poet's Dublin, 2016 (Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph)

The Historians: Poems, 2020

Nonfiction:

W. B. Yeats and His World, 1971 (with Micheál Mac Liammóir)

A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition, 1989

Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, 1995

A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, 2011

Edited Texts:

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, 2000 (with Mark Strand)

Three Irish Poets: An Anthology, 2003

Irish Writers on Writing, 2007

The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, 2007 (with Edward Hirsch)

Charlotte Mew: Selected Poems, 2008

Translation:

After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, 2004 (by Rose Ausländer et al.)

Bibliography

Boland, Eavan. “Conversation: Eavan Boland.” Interview by Jeffrey Brown. PBS NewsHour, NewsHour Productions, 9 Mar. 2012, www.pbs.org/newshour/art/conversation-eavan-boland. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Boland, Eavan. “An Interview with Eavan Boland.” Interview by Marilyn Reizbaum. Contemporary Literature, vol. 30, no. 4, 1989, pp. 470–79.

Boland, Eavan. Interview. By Patty O’Connell. Poets & Writers, Nov.–Dec. 1994, pp. 32–45.

Boland, Eavan. “Renowned Stanford Poet Eavan Boland Interrogates Identity and Nationhood in New Collection.” Interview by Erik Fredner. Stanford News, Stanford U, 26 Feb. 2015, news.stanford.edu/2015/02/26/boland-country-book-022615/. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Boland, Eavan. “The Serinette Principle: The Lyric in Contemporary Poetry.” 1989. Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review, edited by Herbert Leibowitz, U of Michigan P, 1994, pp. 311–32.

Gonzalez, Alexander G., editor. Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Some Male Perspectives. Greenwood Press 1999.

Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle. Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets. Syracuse UP, 1996.

Jabbar, Natalie. “Renowned Poet Professor Eavan Boland Dies at 75.” Stanford Report, 28 Apr. 2020, news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/04/renowned-poet-professor-eavan-boland-dies-75. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Keen, Paul. “The Doubled Edge: Identity and Alterity in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Mosaic, vol. 33, no. 3, 2000, pp. 14–34.

McElroy, James. “The Contemporary Fe/Male Poet: A Preliminary Reading.” New Irish Writing: Essays in Memory of Raymond J. Porter, edited by James D. Brophy and Eamon Grennan, Twayne Publishers, 1989, pp. 189–202.

McGuinness, Arthur E. “Hearth and History: Poetry by Contemporary Irish Women.” Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature, edited by Michael Kenneally, Colin Smythe, 1988, pp. 197–220.

Randolph, Jody Allen. Eavan Boland. Bucknell UP / Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2014.

Smith, Dave. “Some Recent American Poetry: Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies.” The American Poetry Review, Apr. 1982, pp. 36–46.