Citizen Poet
New and Selected Essays
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- USD 20.99
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- USD 20.99
Descripción editorial
At her death in 2020, Eavan Boland left a formidable body of work – poems and prose. Together they transformed Irish poetry and had a considerable influence throughout the English-speaking world. She was also a major essayist, whose potent non-fiction work challenged and changed Irish culture and society. This collection of her most important essays combines autobiographical and critical reflections on the events and influences that shaped her life and work. It includes work never before collected, as well as draft chapters of the memoir Daughter that she was working on when she died.
This wise, generous book, published on what would have been Eavan Boland's 80th birthday, tells the intertwined stories of her life and her writing, her work as a writer who was also a mother and a daughter, her sense of Ireland and exile, and her evolving insights into how the poet can earn, widen and share her freedoms. 'As time went on,' Jody Allen Randolph writes, 'Boland's prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet's work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critique by which they will eventually be judged.'
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This potent posthumous anthology brings together prose pieces by Irish poet Boland (The Historians), who died in 2020 at age 75, largely focused on the plight of women poets. In one 2011 piece, Boland discusses Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's contentious relationship with her father as a metaphor for women poets' ambivalent relationship with the patriarchal poetic tradition they simultaneously draw from and challenge. Boland also frequently explores the intersection of nation, poetry, and womanhood, as in "A Woman Without a Country," where she suggests that women's historical exclusion from politics and citizenship explains why they rarely take up questions of national identity in their poems, and in "Outside History," which contends that the tendency of Irish male poets to use women in their poems as metaphors for the country flattens and oversimplifies both. Of particular interest is the unfinished and previously unpublished "Daughter," a collection of letters, journal entries, and stray stanzas by Boland and other writers that uses its hodgepodge design to convey the "incoherence" Boland felt striving to balance her career with motherhood. The discerning essays attest to Boland's keen sense of how poetry intersects with social and political issues, offering insight into the philosophy that undergirded her craft. Poetry lovers should take note.
