Eavan Boland
Brief History
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Born in Dublin, Ireland 1944 to Frederick Boland a career diplomat
who later became the U.N. President and Frances Kelly a noted
post-expressionist painter. She was the youngest of five children.
Moved with family to London in 1951
where she first encountered anti-Irish
sentiment. This strengthened her
identification with her Irish heritage
 Returned to Ireland and attended Trinity
College earning her B. A. and publishing
poetry.
 Married author Kevin Casey and had two
daughters.
 Currently teaching at Stanford University
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Bibliography
POETRY
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23 Poems (1962)
New Territory (1967)
The War Horse (1975)
In Her Own Image
(1980)
Night Feed (1982)
The Journey (1987)
Selected Poems 19801990 (1990)
Outside History (1990)
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In a Time of Violence
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The Lost Land (1998)
Against Love Poetry
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New Collected Poems
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Domestic Violence (2007)
(1994)
(2001)
(2005)
PROSE
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Object Lessons: The Life
of the Woman and the
Poet in Our Time (1995)
In 1990, Boland published Outside
History, a book of poetry divided
into three sections: Object Lessons,
Outside History: A Sequence, and
Distances. The following is an
excerpt from R. T. Smith’s essay
“Altered Light: Outside History”
“In her relentless excavation of the local
events and moments that bear witness to
women’s legitimate place in history and the
interpretative community, Eavan Boland has
for a decade brought to light the nature of
the myths that women have been relegated
to. . . . Each poem represents a significant
skirmish or pitched battle in the quest for full
investiture . . .. The initial section, ‘Object
Lessons,’ introduces motifs of exile, fragility
and damage, and the puzzling interactions”
between men and women through
meditations on an elegant fan, [etc.].
Although she makes no pretence of
presenting ‘objective’ lessons, she does
focus on ‘objectionable’ ones, lessons in
which the outsider’s perspective is given
weight, the acts and words in the private
house and garden are recognized as too
close to the lens for conventional history to
examine. This is an insurrection against
traditional male iconography.”