Outside History

Boland Eavan

"Outside History" was Eavan Boland's first collection of new poems since "The Journey" (1987). Here she explores private themes, but in ways which open out on the wider public sphere.

Often the poems arise from the place in which womanhood and nationhood meet, a place that Irish history sometimes obscures, hence the title, "Outside History".

The "radical but undoctrinaire feminism" which the "London Review of Books" identified in her "Selected Poems" remains a source of power in this new work, heightened by her sensual and painterly lyricism. The domestic and the historical come together: a wealth of vivid "obstinate details" evokes a larger emotional world. Eavan Boland is indeed "a fine poet moving on to a new plateau of achievement" (LRB).

About the Author

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She has taught at Trinity College, University College and Bowdoin College Dublin, and at the University of Iowa. She is currently Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's previous works include "The Journey and other poems" (1987), "Night Feed" (1994), "The Lost Land" (1998) and "Code" (2001). Her poems and essays have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She is a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She divides her time between California and Dublin where she lives with her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey.

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