Object Lessons - Softcover

Boland, Eavan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857548825 ISBN 13: 9781857548822

Publisher: Lives and Letters, 2006

Synopsis

'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.'
In Object Lessons Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood, nationhood, and the relationship, for a writer, between the two. Deeply personal, focused on the places and times of her own lived experience, Object Lessons finds in the details of one writer's life the larger significances that link the individual to a community, culture, a history and a future. Boland explores what it means to move from being the object of a poem to being its author, what it means to claim a radically new space as a woman and a poet, while retaining a verifying sense of continuity and connection. The book becomes a portrait of a critical imagination making a new path, finding new meaning in the objects it encounters.

About this title

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 taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College in Maine, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Historians (2020), which won the Costa Poetry Award 2020 and was a 2020 Book of the Year in the TLS, Guardian, Sunday Independent and Irish Times, The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1982), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). Her poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She divided her time between California and Dublin where she lived with her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey. Eavan died in Dublin on 27th April 2020.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lives and Letters
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857548825
• ISBN 13: 9781857548822
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 272