Eavan Boland

Portrait of Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland 1944–2020
1944Born

Eavan Boland (born 1944, died 2020) was an Irish poet and feminist.

Boland was born in Dublin. Her father was a career diplomat and she was educated in London and New York as well as in her native city, graduating from Trinity College.

Her first books, In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), established her reputation as a writer on specifically feminist themes and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.

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Her publications also include An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 (1996), Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (1990) and a prose memoir Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995). Her collection In a Time of Violence (1994) received a Lannon Award and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. All of her volumes of poetry have been Poetry Book Society Choices.

Boland has taught at a number of universities, including Trinity College, Dublin. She has also been writer in residence there, and at the National Maternity Hospital. She is professor of English at Stanford University and is married with two daughters.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Eavan Boland.

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What readers say about Eavan Boland

  1. On Anorexic

    “This poem is not about anorexia at all. anorexia in this poem is symbolism for the Irish women and their distorted image of themselves. It is traditional for Irish poets to be male and for females to be ornaments in poetry.Women are told that their creative “gift is dangerous to [their] tradition…”

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Most discussed

  1. Anorexic3 comments
  2. More Than Suspect1 comment
  3. Outside History1 comment
  4. That the Science of Cartography Is Limited1 comment
  5. The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me1 comment

All 9 poems

In a Time of Violence · 1994 · 1 poem
Colony · 1998 · 3 poems
Against Love Poetry · 2001 · 1 poem
Other poems · 4