Citizen Poet

Costa Poetry Award 2020Irish PEN Award for Literature 2019Bob Hughes Lifetime Award 2017Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 1994Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry 1994At her death in 2020, Eavan Boland left a formidable body of work – poems and prose. Together they transformed Irish poetry and had a considerable impact throughout the English-speaking world. She was also a major feminist thinker and essayist. She challenged and changed Irish culture and society, and her challenge remains potent. 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. The book, published on what would have been Eavan Boland's 80th birthday, opens with substantial extracts from "Object Lessons: the life of the woman and the poet in our times" (1995), including the key essays "Outside History" and "The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma". From "A Journey with Two Maps: becoming a woman poet" (2011) the editors have selected the title essay and "Becoming an Irish Poet", "Domestic Violence" and the celebrated "Letter to a Young Woman Poet".