Eavan Boland

Today is the birthday of poet Eavan Boland (books by this author), born in Dublin (1944). When she was just six, her father was appointed the Irish Ambassador to the UK and moved the family to London, where she first witnessed anti-Irish hostility. She returned to Dublin as a young teen, with a deeper appreciation of her heritage and a desire to write. But when she looked more closely at the Irish literary tradition, she found almost no women poets in the ranks. There was "a magnetic distance between the word 'woman' and the word 'poet,'" she said. While she admired Keats and Joyce, she felt strongly that her own life should make it into her poetry, so she wrote about the trials and rewards of motherhood, or life in the suburbs. She published her first collection, 23 Poems, while still a freshman in college in 1962, and followed up with another 10 books of verse, including Night Feed (1982) and In a Time of Violence (1994), for which she received the Lannan Literary Award.

Boland is the co-founder of Arlen House Press. She divides her time between Dublin and California, where she directs the creative writing program at Stanford University.

Speaking on the importance of the oral tradition in Irish poetry, Boland said: "Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization."