Citizen Poet
New and Selected Essays
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A landmark volume of essays from “Ireland’s leading feminist poet” (New York Times Book Review) that celebrates a transformative vision of womanhood, nation, and poetry.
Eavan Boland was a trailblazing poet, critic, teacher, and essayist. Carving a path for the next generation, she broke open the male-dominated canon of Irish literature and mapped her poetic journey through the contours of life as a mother, daughter, and citizen. This generous and wise volume contains essays selected from Object Lessons (1995) and A Journey with Two Maps (2011); later writings addressing the changing nature of poetry; and a draft of a reflective memoir called “Daughter,” on which Boland was working at the time of her death.
A compelling blend of memoir, analysis, and argument, Citizen Poet traces the arc of Boland’s pioneering view of nationhood through the lens of womanhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Of particular interest is the unfinished and previously unpublished "Daughter," a collection of letters, journal entries, and stray stanzas by Boland and other writers that uses its hodgepodge design to convey the "incoherence"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.
