Author

There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.

From Eavan Boland

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

From Eavan Boland

In those years of the Fifties, in London and New York, I lived, without knowing it, in a time when the profoundest changes were happening: when a radical alteration was getting ready to happen in the way a society saw young girls. And, as a consequence, in the way they saw themselves.

From Eavan Boland

I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.

From Eavan Boland

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

From Eavan Boland

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

From Eavan Boland

New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

From Eavan Boland

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?

From Eavan Boland

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

From Eavan Boland

I was a foggy, erratic teenager: a fifth child, the last in the queue for conversation or attention.

From Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland

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