4/22/24, 4:41 PM Eavan Boland, ‘Disruptive’ Irish Poet, Is Dead at 75 - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/books/eavan-boland-dead.html

Eavan Boland, ‘Disruptive’ Irish Poet, Is Dead

at 75
Her work addressed domestic themes seldom found in the male-dominated
world of Irish poetry and won her many accolades.

By Neil Genzlinger

April 28, 2020

Eavan Boland, who began publishing poetry in the mid-1960s in Ireland and soon
became one of the most prominent women in the male-dominated literary
landscape of that country, died on Monday at her home in Dublin. She was 75.

Stanford University, where Ms. Boland had taught since 1995, said in a statement
that the cause was a stroke.

Stanford, where Ms. Boland had directed the creative writing program for 21 years,
said she returned to Dublin this spring to be close to her family during the
coronavirus crisis and had been teaching a seminar on 20th-century Irish
literature remotely.

Ms. Boland acknowledged that the emergence of her and other women on the Irish
literary landscape was unsettling in a land where “poet” generally meant William
Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney and other men.

“In my generation,” she told The South Bend Tribune of Indiana in 1997, when she
was doing a reading at the University of Notre Dame, “women went from being the
objects of the Irish poem to being the authors of the Irish poem, and that was very
disruptive in a literature that probably wasn’t prepared for that.”

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Yet her numerous volumes of poetry earned her many accolades, including a
lifetime achievement award in 2017 at the Irish Book Awards.

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Her poems had a personal side, and a feminine side, that work by male poets often
did not. There is, for instance, “Night Feed,” the title poem from a 1982 collection, in
which a woman feeds an infant daughter:

I tiptoe in.

I lift you up

Wriggling

In your rosy, zipped sleeper.

Yes this is the hour

For the early bird and me

When finder is keeper.

Another poem, “Code,” from the 2001 collection “Against Love Poetry,” is an ode to
Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in early computing. It concludes with these lines:

I am writing at a screen as blue,

As any hill, as any lake, composing this

to show you how the world begins again:

One word at a time.

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One woman to another.

Though her poems might speak of the past, Ms. Boland was not misty-eyed about
it.

“I certainly don’t have any nostalgia for Irish history, I can tell you that,” she said in
a 2014 interview with Nashville Review. “Nobody would who came out of that
island.”

The same was true of the Irish literary canon as it was defined in her youth.

“I’m afraid I was one of the critics of the canon,” she said. “I think everybody
knows that the canon in 1950 was exclusive of some of the very important voices. I
don’t know who could possibly be nostalgic about the canon 75 years ago, certainly
not if you were a woman or a minority.”

Eavan Frances Boland was born on Sept. 24, 1944, in Dublin. Her father, Frederick,
was a diplomat, and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a painter. Because of her
father’s diplomatic postings, the family lived in London and New York before
returning to Dublin, where Ms. Boland attended Trinity College, receiving a
bachelor’s degree there in 1966. Her first poetry collection, “New Territory,” was
published the next year.

Ms. Boland, who married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969, acknowledged that it
took some time for her to find her poetic voice and to make that voice heard.

“The subjects of the Irish poem back then were often landscapes or historical
events or political memory,” she told the arts and culture magazine Believer in
2014. “I was a woman in a house in the suburbs, married with two small children. It
was a life lived by many women around me, but it was still not named in Irish
poetry.”

“I’ve often said,” she added, “that when I was young it was easier to have a political
murder in a poem than a baby.”

She was a lecturer at Trinity while also being a mother.

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“I used to work out of notebooks, and I learned when I had young children that you
can always do something,” she told Stanford Magazine in 2002. “If you can’t do a
poem, you can do a line. And if you can’t do a line, you can do an image — and that
pathway that leads you along, in fragments, becomes astonishingly valuable.”

Among Ms. Boland’s other collections was “Outside History” (1991), which focused
on women and their roles.

“A fresh eye for the way commonplace things look allows Boland to set most of her
poems domestically,” Carol Ann Duffy wrote in a review in The Guardian, “and her
sense of country and ancestry deepens the collection into an authoritative
femaleness.”

Ms. Boland published regularly in magazines including The New Yorker, which ran
its most recent Boland poem just this week.

Jill Bialosky, vice president and executive editor at W.W. Norton & Company, who
edited Ms. Boland for 30 years, said her forthcoming collection, “The Historians,”
due in October, explores the way the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of
women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.

In addition to her husband, Ms. Boland is survived by two daughters, Sarah and
Eavan, and four grandchildren.

In 2018, to mark the 100th anniversary of the granting of suffrage to women in

Ireland, Ms. Boland read excerpts at the United Nations from a poem she had
written for the occasion. The poem, “Our Future Will Become the Past of Other
Women,” included a section that, Ms. Boland told the assembly, was about the
grandmothers and great-grandmothers of the suffragists, women who had never
had the chance to vote:

Ghost-sufferer, our ghost-sister

Remind us now again that history

Changes in one moment with one mind.

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That it belongs to us, to all of us.

As we mark these hundred years

We will not leave you behind.

When she was done, several ambassadors read sections of the poem in their native
languages.

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. More
about Neil Genzlinger

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 28 of the New York edition with the headline: Eavan Boland, 75, Irish Poet Who
Unsettled Male Field

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