Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Eavan Boland
Standard Name: Boland, Eavan
Birth Name: Eavan Aisling Boland
EB
was a leading Irish poet (latterly part resident in the USA) who also established a reputation as a critic writing on literary issues of feminism, nationalism, and modernism. Her work appeared in many anthologies as well as her own volumes, and she lectured internationally.
While calling Boland's poetry unquestionably valuable,
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
80
AS
questions her arguments about history. Boland
's poems, she feels, give an impression of a grave, even solemn intelligence, very little ruffled by the politics of...
Textual Production
Ann Jellicoe
Among other givers of the Judith Wilson lecture on poetry or drama was the Irish poet Eavan Boland
in 1988. AJ
's essay was included in Robert W. Corrigan
's The Making of Theatre: From...
Textual Production
Kate O'Brien
KOB
published another novel, Pray for the Wanderer, in which, says Eavan Boland
, she purged her disappointment with de Valera
's Ireland.
Boland, Eavan, and Kate O’Brien. “Introduction”. The Last of Summer, Virago, p. v - xv.
ix
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
AS
published a critique of Eavan Boland
's Outside History (not her poetry collection of that title, but an article in PN Review no. 75) for the same journal's no. 88.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
71ff
Textual Production
Elaine Feinstein
EF
followed her life of Pushkin
the following year with After Pushkin, an anthology of translations and imitations of his work, and responses to it, by contributors including Ted Hughes
, Seamus Heaney
,...
Textual Features
Ruth Padel
RP
takes the journey as the most central of all poetic images. The first part of her book is a guide to reading poetry, divided under headings of which many include the words journey,...
Reception
Kate O'Brien
Eavan Boland
reckons this book, together with Mary Lavelle, The Last of Summer, and The Land of Spices, as KOB
's finest novels.
Boland, Eavan, and Kate O’Brien. “Introduction”. The Last of Summer, Virago, p. v - xv.
x-xi
Publishing
Kate O'Brien
She finished writing it in September 1942, with the war at its height, deep in the English countryside at Croyle House near Cullompton in Devon. A stage adaptation by KOB
and John Perry
opened...
Literary responses
Elaine Feinstein
The New Yorker was grudging
“Books Briefly Noted. Anna of All the Russias”. The New Yorker.
but Eavan Boland
wrote in the Spectator that Akhmatova's luck ha[d] held in provoking such a strong, vivid, and freshly informative biography.
Feinstein, Elaine. The Elaine Feinstein Page. http://www.elainefeinstein.com/.
Literary responses
Kate O'Brien
Eavan Boland
calls this novel plangent and polemical.
Boland, Eavan, and Kate O’Brien. “Introduction”. The Last of Summer, Virago, p. v - xv.
xi
Literary responses
Penelope Shuttle
The poet Anne Stevenson
, whose review offered these summaries of Shuttle's imagery, marvelled at the vulnerability of a dead-serious poetic voice(without the defences of aggression, wit, irony, mockery or word-play)
Stevenson, Anne. “Hearing the downpour”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4059, p. 65.
65
which makes...
Literary responses
Carol Ann Duffy
This book garnered the Forward Poetry Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, and another Scottish Arts Council
Book Award.
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin.
prelims
“The Knitting Circle”. London South Bank University: Lesbian and Gay Staff Association.
Eavan Boland
called CADone of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry—any poetry—for years.
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin.
152
Literary responses
Penelope Shuttle
Reviewers were respectful, even enthusiastic. PS
was likened to poets as various as Eavan Boland
and Emily Dickinson
, and praised for energy, for vigorous and various abundance,and for attention to the erogenous zones...
Timeline
18 November 2017: A group of poets and academics calling itself...
Building item
18 November 2017
A group of poets and academics calling itself FIRED!
, formed to protest the absence of women from the new Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, held its first event, at an arts centre in Belfast.
Texts
Boland, Eavan. 23 Poems. Gallagher Press, 1962.
Boland, Eavan. “A Boat on a River”. Mslexia, Vol.
6
, p. 10.
Corcoran, Clodagh et al. A Dozen Lips. Attic Press, 1994.
Boland, Eavan. A Kind of Scar. Attic Press, 1989.
Boland, Eavan. A Woman Without a Country. Carcanet Press, 2014.
Boland, Eavan. Collected Poems. Carcanet, 1995.
Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. Norton, 1994.
Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. Carcanet, 1994.
Boland, Eavan, and Constance Short. In Her Own Image. Arlen House, 1980, http://ILL - Robarts.
