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Biography
Irish

Eavan Boland

1944 — 2020

Eavan Boland was an Irish poet and essayist whose work — including In a Time of Violence (1994), The Lost Land (1998), and A Woman Without a Country (2014) — challenged the masculine tradition of Irish poetry by insisting on the centrality of women's experience to Irish literary culture. She was one of the most important Irish poets of the late twentieth century.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityIrish
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Eavan Boland (1944–2020) was born in Dublin on 24 September 1944. Her father was a diplomat; she spent part of her childhood in London and New York. She studied at Trinity College Dublin. She taught at Stanford University from 1996 until her death.

Life and Career

Boland’s early poetry was accomplished but conventional. Her breakthrough came with In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), collections that deliberately centred domestic life — menstruation, anorexia, breastfeeding, suburbia — in a tradition that had excluded such subjects as unpoetic.

Her critical essay A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (1989) argued that Irish poetry had mythologized women as symbols of the nation while excluding actual women’s voices. This argument was as influential as any of her poems.

In a Time of Violence (1994), The Lost Land (1998), and Domestic Violence (2007) are her finest collections: poems about Irish history, emigration, womanhood, and the relationship between personal and national identity.

Major Works and Themes

Boland wrote about Irish identity, womanhood, history, and the politics of poetic tradition. She insisted that women’s domestic experience was as legitimate a subject for poetry as the heroic narratives of the Irish literary tradition.

Key Works

  • In a Time of Violence (1994)
  • New Collected Poems (2005)

Collecting Boland

New Territory first edition (Allen Figgis, 1967) — her debut — brings $100–$200. Later collections (W.W. Norton, Carcanet) bring $15–$30. Boland died in 2020.