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:	9780393314373
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/1996
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

What People are Saying About This

Mark Strand

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.

Editorial Reviews

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"

From the Publisher

Blending autobiography with argument, Boland, a well-known poet in Ireland, addresses the challenge of reconciling her identity as a woman and mother writing in suburbia with the male-oriented political tradition of Irish poetry. Beginning with recollections of her earlier life in Ireland and her grandmother, Boland attempts to explain the woman poet's conflict with assuming the role of creator after having been traditionally treated as an object in Irish poetry. The author, most recently of the acclaimed poetry collection In a Time of Violence (LJ 3/1/94), structures her latest book like a poem, presenting an argument, leaving it, and then returning to it again. This method is well suited to her self-conscious exploration of the duality between woman and poet. Complex and thought-provoking, this title will appeal to readers interested in the craft of poetry and woman's role as artist.-Nancy R. Ives, Geneseo Univ., N.Y.

Library Journal

"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