Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

by Eavan Boland

Overview

In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work.

Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393346466
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/25/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	749 KB

About the Author

Eavan Boland (1944—2020) was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Outside History and several volumes of nonfiction, and was coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, among other honors. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and Stanford University, where she was the director of the creative writing program.

Editorial Reviews

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary poets weighs in with a splendid collection of essays woven of sensuous autobiography, convoluted national history, and postmodern literary criticism. If this were a tapestry, its central figure would be a woman surrounded by playing children, burgeoning gardens, and the homey details of family life; she would be posed against a backdrop symbolic of civil war, emigration, and ripening nationalism. But how would we know that woman is a poet? Boland's lifelong project has been to recognize the poet in woman, the woman in poet. In Ireland, woman appears central to poetry, but only as object, especially as an object symbolic of the nation. The ordinary life of family, sexuality, and nurturing love is lived "outside history" (the title of one of Boland's collections of poems) and outside literature as well. What rhetoric will include this formerly excluded life? What form? In her poetry, Boland has answered those questions; here she specifies them in somber and moving detail: the rhetoric must be made of silences as well as speech, and the form must incorporate absences as well as presences. Abstruse as her subject may seem, Boland's crystalline prose makes it accessible and intensely moving.

Patricia Monaghan

"Eavan Boland's Object Lessons is the most perceptive account that I have read of what it means to be a woman writing poetry in the late twentieth century."

Mark Strand

"In a prose style so lyrical, spare and elegiac it rivals poetry, she draws us into personal memory, autobiographical anecdote and family history. . . . It is not like any other book in memory: inspired, relentless, deliberately and eloquently hand-drawn."

The Nation

"Thoughtfully, Boland recounts the long, uncertain process by which she came to construct (as any poet must) a persona: how she grew out of that well-schooled girl with an unsettled past and a well-received early book, into herself, a wife and mother residing in a Dublin suburb, beginning to write poems of another kind. . . . Eavan Boland has made an honest book and written of intricate matters courteously. She has proposed to her reader a composed, level-headed, yet spirited argument."

|Los Angeles Times

In a prose style so lyrical, spare and elegiac it rivals poetry, she draws us into personal memory, autobiographical anecdote and family history. . . . It is not like any other book in memory: inspired, relentless, deliberately and eloquently hand-drawn.-- "The Nation"

Thoughtfully, Boland recounts the long, uncertain process by which she came to construct (as any poet must) a persona: how she grew out of that well-schooled girl with an unsettled past and a well-received early book, into herself, a wife and mother residing in a Dublin suburb, beginning to write poems of another kind. . . . Eavan Boland has made an honest book and written of intricate matters courteously. She has proposed to her reader a composed, level-headed, yet spirited argument.-- "Los Angeles Times"

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