Eavan Boland, one of Ireland's most distinguished poets, died April 27 at age 75. Boland's first two collections, 23 Poems and Autumn Essay, were published before she was 20 years old. Her collection In a Time of Violence (1994) received a Lannan Award and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her books include A Woman Without a Country; Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990; An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1957-1987; and In Her Own Image. Her poem "Eviction," from her upcoming collection The Historians (Norton, $26.95, 9781324006879), appears in the May 4 issue of the New Yorker.
Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole wrote that Boland "has occupied the Irish public poetic tradition that stems from W.B. Yeats, taking on its concerns with myth, history and the Irish landscape while forcing it to make room for female experience.... In part this was a struggle to make room for the body. She made female sexuality and motherhood into poetic subjects. She evoked domestic violence, anorexia, infanticide, mastectomy, bodily functions from menstruation to masturbation."
