Eavan Boland

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1944

Eavan Aisling Boland born on September 24, in Dublin, Ireland. Her father is a distinguished Irish diplomat who served as Irish ambassador to Great Britain (1950-1956) and to the United States (1956-1964). Her mother is a painter who had studied in Paris in the 1930s. Because of her father's diplomatic career, EB is educated in Dublin, London, and New York.

1950

Family moves to London, where EB experiences anti-Irish prejudice for the first time.

1962

Attends Trinity College, Dublin. Publishes her first chapbook.

1967

Teaches at Trinity.

1968

Receives the Macauley Fellowship for poetry.

1969

Marries the novelist Kevin Casey; has two daughters.

After her marriage, EB leaves academe and moves out of Dublin and into the suburbs to become "wife, mother, and housewife."

1980

EB publishes a controversial work, In Her Own Image, that brings her into debates over feminism and the role of female poets in Ireland. Consequently, EB has been a stable and influential voice for equality for women poets in the male-dominated literary world of Ireland.

Co-founds Arlen House, an Irish feminist press.

1990s

EB teaches at several universities in the United States.

1995

Professorship at Stanford U, chair of Creative Writing.

2001

Against Love Poetry is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

2007

Domestic Violence is shortlisted for the Forward prize in the UK.

Her poem, "Violence Against Women," from the same volume is awarded the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry for the best poem published in 2007 in Shenandoah magazine.

2015

Her poem "Quarantine" is one of 10 poems shortlisted for RTÉ's selection of Ireland's favorite poems of the last 100 years .

2018

EB is elected to the Royal Irish Academy, an independent academic body that promotes study and excellence in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is one of Ireland's premier learned societies and cultural institutions.

She is commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy to write the poem "Our future will become the past of other women" to be read at the UN and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of female suffrage in Ireland.

2020

27 April: EB dies in Dublin from a stroke.



Occasionally I see myself, or the ghost of myself, in the places where I first became a poet. On the pavement just around Stephen's Green for instance, with its wet trees and sharp railings. What I see is not an actual figure, but a sort of remembered loneliness. The poets I knew were not women: the women I knew were not poets. The conversations I had, or wanted to have, were never complete.



Images for Boland's poems