Eavan Boland

By (author) Jody Allen Randolph

Not available to order

Publication date:

26 November 2013

Length of book:

246 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611485370

In this powerful and authoritative study Jody Allen Randolph providesthe fullest account yet of the work of a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature as well as in contemporary women’s writing. Eavan Boland’s achievement in changing the map of Irish poetry is tracked and analyzed from her first poems to the present. The book traces the evolution of that achievement, guiding the reader through Boland’s early attachment to Yeats, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich, and her eventual, challenging amendments in poetry and prose to Ireland’s poetic tradition. Using research from private papers the book also traces a time of upheaval and change in Ireland, exploring Boland's connection to Mary Robinson, in a chapter that details the nexus of a woman president and a woman poet in a country that was resistant to both. Finally, this book invites the reader to share a compelling perspective on the growth of a poet described by one critic as Ireland’s “first great woman poet.”

Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One: The Poetics of Origin
Beginnings
The Muse Mother
Chapter Two: The Nexus of Influence
Claims of Belonging
The Dour Line
Chapter Three: From Patria to Matria
The First Draft
In Her Own Image
Night Feed
Chapter Four: Out of Myth into History
The Journey
Outside History
The Telling of Stories
Chapter Five: Changing the Past
In a Time of Violence
Object Lessons
The Lost Land
Chapter Six: Exiles in our Own Country
Against Love Poetry
Domestic Violence
Journeys and Maps
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The new scholarship has ensured that we now read poems through the highly glazed window of theory. In Allen Randolph’s and Boland’s cases, this is a happy match: this book is a monument to a long and scholarly relationship. ... The narrative of Allen Randolph’s book is how such a first-rate poet found such a first-rate readership, despite a distance of air miles and cultural background. Allen Randolph seems a generous, expansive intelligence, both analytical and affirming, in a ground-marking work of literary synthesis.