Becoming a Woman Poet: Eavan Boland (2012)

For the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series 2012, Eavan Boland read from her work on March 5th in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre. Her reading was inspired in part by the Folger exhibition Shakespeare's Sisters, on view January 21 - May 14, 2012.

Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland’s poems examine womanhood and history with a sheer, lyrical grace and skill. Boland has published ten volumes of poetry, including Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, New Collected Poems, Domestic Violence, and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-87. She is the recipient of the Lannan Award for Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. In addition to her books of poetry, Boland wrote the prose volume Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time; edited an anthology of German women poets, After Every War; and co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. She is currently the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities at Stanford University where she directs the creative writing program.

Excerpts

From "7. Wisdom"*

The air hoarded frost. The lilac was a ghost of lilac. It was eerie and expectant, both. Metal touched clay, grated against stone. It was all detailed, slow. Cigarettes were lit, there was laughter. They were digging up an era, a city, my life. They were using spades, machines, their wits.