![]() Her exemplary, recent editorship of Poetry Ireland Review showed a mind engaged and open. She was an important presence in the Irish poetry world. She has many elegant and footsure poems but over the years I’ve particularly enjoyed teaching Love and The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me, which I admire for their tonal authenticity, their salvaging of personal detail and their way of persuading imagery into argument. It really was a masterclass and, like her own writing, it opened up ways of thinking freshly about how poems and lives absorb each other, (and look askance at each other too). When she read a poem, it was a different poem to the one I would read by myself: she’d tease it open, showing how it enacted its technical choices and earned its affect. She was generous, rigorous and wonderfully gossipy. I was mid-20s, a spectacularly aimless postgraduate student beginning, tentatively, to cajole poetry into the centre of my life. Vona Groarke Perhaps more than most, I owe gratitude to Eavan Boland: she's responsible for my two children, as I met Conor at a six-week workshop given by her in 1989 when she was Poet in Residence at TCD. His latest book is Prophecy (Carcanet Press) Thomas McCarthy is a Co Waterford poet who worked at Cork City Libraries for many years. But it is for those great books, In Her Own Image, The Lost Land, Object Lessons, that I will cherish her exemplary life for the rest of my own life. She had a mischievous, wicked sense of humour when discussing the vanity of male poets. So I adored her for that effect upon my life.īut I loved her for having written The Winning of Etain, a poem in her youthful masterpiece, New Territory, published as far back as 1967. Her review of my first collection in The Irish Times in 1978, when I was just 24, set in motion a whole sequence of marvellous events in my life that lasted for years and years, from a phone-call with the then US ambassador who had read her review to the Ireland Funds Award in 1984. ![]() She was passionate, adamant, insistent, searching and learned. She was a powerful leader in Irish poetry and a moral leader of women's political action, but much more than that. Thomas McCarthy I have been shaken by Eavan Boland's death in a deeply personal way that is hard to explain her death has shocked me to the core. Her selected poems, As If By Magic, is forthcoming.Ģ006: Eavan Boland and fellow poet Paula Meehan at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre for a reading. Paula Meehan is a poet and was Ireland Professor of Poetry (2013-2016). And ready to record the contradictions. If we need or want a national poet, as we sometimes do, then her compassionate, ironic, and truth-laden art is there for the taking - I am your citizen: composed of / your fictions, your compromise, I am / a part of your story and its outcome. We'll read them in candlelight, and in the bright light of the stretching days, and she will never be far from us: she understood this. But on this beautiful spring morning, when the two kilometres allowed us robs us of our desire to come together and mourn, to celebrate a great and transforming spirit, then it is her poems that will be our salve. Paula Meehan In time, I know, our devastation at the loss of Eavan Boland will be tempered by profound gratitude for what she gave us and what she left us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |