Eavan Boland

Eavan Aisling Boland
24 September 1944 – 27 April 2020

Eavan Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was born in 1944 in Dublin, Ireland. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught since 1996. Her work deals with issues of Irish national identity and the role of women in Irish history.

In 'A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet', she said, "poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.”

She speaks about the ordinary life of women in her poetry. She said, "I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.”

She wanted to write an account of female experience. "The life I lived was a woman's life."

Her poem "Quarantine," quoted in the video, was one of 10 poems shortlisted for RTÉ's selection of Ireland's favorite poems of the last 100 years in 2015.

It is based on a story told in a book called Mo Scéal Féin by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire (the title means he was a priest). The book was published in 1907 and in the Irish language, the title means “My Own Story.”

The story is recounted in that book of a couple - Kit and Patrick, who left the workhouse during the 1847 famine to return to their cabin. Both were weakened by lack of food, and she had famine fever. In the morning, they were both found dead. In the text, it says, “the feet of the woman were in Patrick’s bosom, as if he had tried to warm them.”

Source: "Shadows in the Story”: An Interview with Eavan Boland by William Walsh in the Georgia Review.

Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge | Irish Writers

For such a small island, Ireland has produced some of the finest writers in the world. Playwrights, poets, short story writers and four Nobel Prize winners, to name but a few, it is an extraordinary heritage. This series is designed to deepen your connection to Ireland, the country's heart and soul, and its people's rich literary heritage. As Yeats pointed out, we need to know the writers, the poets and the playwrights of that landscape and country to come to know Ireland in our own body and soul.