Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Eavan Boland

Literary Birthday – 24 September – Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland was born on 24 September 1944 and died on 27 April 2020.

Eavan Boland Quotes

  1. I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it. It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin.
  2. The idea of a poetry which can fathom silences, follow the outsider’s trail -that draws me in.
  3. Teaching helps me talk about poetry. Writing helps me understand what I’ve talked about at a visceral level.
  4. I don’t think poetry is a particularly good form of expression. I know that goes against the grain, but I believe that. Photographs are more accurate. Theatre is more eloquent. But poetry is a superb, powerful and true form of experience. That’s the satisfaction for me. I don’t write a poem to express an experience. I write it to experience the experience
  5. Poetry doesn’t confer importance on human experience: it’s the other way around. Of course, you can have the courage of your experience, and feel it’s what you want to write about, but you still have to assemble the poem with craft and care. Self-expression is not art.

Eavan Boland was an Irish poet whose poems appeared in more than 30 collections. She was the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including The Lost Land, An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987, and In a Time of Violence. In addition to her poetry, she also wrote a volume of prose entitled Object Lessons: The Life Of The Woman And The Poet In Our Time, and was co-editor of The Making Of A Poem: A Norton Anthology Of Poetic Forms (2000), with Mark Shad. Her works included Against Love Poetry.

Source for Image: Black and white photo of Eavan Boland in 1996
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eavan_Boland_in_1996.jpg#filelinks


by Amanda Patterson
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Posted on: 24th September 2013
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