In Memory of Eavan Boland

 

RIP, Eavan Boland, Hon. MRIA, Irish poet, author, and professor who died April 27th, 2020. 

 

 

Her work deals with Irish national identity and the role of women in Irish history. President Higgins, in his tribute to her, credits Boland with revealing hidden Ireland – “what was suffered, neglected, evaded, given insufficient credit.”

 

Boland derived much inspiration from everyday life but faltered initially in writing about the mundane until she realised she could ascribe importance to it. Thus she turned female sexuality and motherhood into poetic subjects, becoming one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature.

 

 

In her words, “I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire – whatever you want to call it – that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.”

 

And what a life. Among her achievements, Eavan Boland served as writer in residence at Trinity College and University College Dublin, before joining Stanford University. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards in 2017.

 

The following year, she was commissioned by Ireland’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the Royal Irish Academy to commemorate the centenary of the women of Ireland, Mná na hÉireann, being granted suffrage and casting their first ballot. Her poem, entitled ‘Our future will become the past of other women‘ is linked.

 

 

“Poetry doesn’t seek to be a commodity; it doesn’t change history or events – it changes people.” (Eavan Boland)

 

However, in inserting the female voice into Irish poetic tradition, Boland changed more than people, she changed Irish literary culture.

 

Many wonderful tributes to Eavan Boland have been written in the hours since her passing. Read Fintan O’ Toole’s tribute in the Irish Times, Martin Doyle’s tribute in the Irish Times, the tribute from Ciarán Benson, Chair of Poetry Ireland  agus ómós as Gaeilge i Tuairisc.ie. 

 

• Hear Eavan Boland read Eviction (published in the New Yorker).

• Read Quarantine, one of the poems shortlisted in The Poem for Ireland in 2015 – a poem honouring an unidentified couple who died during the Famine in the winter of 1847 and honouring how love can grow stronger in terrible circumstances.

• By chance, Daniel Mulhall, Ireland’s Ambassador to the US read Eavan Boland’s poem ‘The Emigrant Irish‘ on the day before her passing. 

• A large body of her work is to be found on Poetry Foundation.

• Links to the issues of Poetry Ireland she edited are to be found here.

 

To her husband, daughters, grandchildren, wider family, friends, colleagues and students, I extend sincere sympathy today. Her legacy lies not just in her own extensive body of work but in the children she reared, the people she inspired, and in the voices of the many poets she mentored and taught. 

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.