Eavan Boland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eavan Boland is an Irish poet.

Boland was born in Dublin on 24 September 1944. Her father, Frederick Boland was a career diplomat and her mother was the post-expressionist painter, Frances Kelly.

She was educated in London and New York as well as in her native Dublin; graduating from Trinity College with a first class honors degree in English Literature. In 2004 she received an honorary degree from Trinity.

Eavan Boland's first book of poetry was "New Territory" published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This was followed by "The War Horse" (1975), In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.

Boland's 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 Lannan Award and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. All of her volumes of poetry have been Poetry Book Society Choices in the UK.In the United States her publisher is W.W.Norton. Her volume of poems "Against Love Poetry" (W.W. Norton 2001) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

One of her poems, "The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me", is one of the most popular and highly-regarded contemporary poems.

She is co-editor of The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). She also published a volume of translations in 2004 called After Every War (Princeton University Press). The translations are of German-speaking women poets.

Boland has taught at a number of universities, including Trinity College, Dublin. She was also writer in residence at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the National Maternity Hospital.

She is currently Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program there.

She is married to author Kevin Casey; they have two daughters.

[edit] Publications

New Territory The War Horse (Gollancz 1975)
In Her Own Image (Arlen House: Dublin 1980)
Night Feed (Arlen House: Dublin 1982)
The Journey and other poems (Carcanet Press 1986)
Selected Poems: (Carcanet Press 1989)
Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (W.W.Norton 1990)
In a Time of Violence (W.W.Norton: 1994)
Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (W. W. Norton, 1995)
Collected Poems (Carcanet Press: 1995)
An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 (W.W.Norton 1996)
The Lost Land ((W.W. Norton & Co: 1998)(Carcanet Press)
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000).
After Every War Twentieth-Century Women Poets (Translations: Princeton University Press 2004)
New Collected Poems: (Carcanet Press UK 2006)