Eavan Boland
Arc is a curated chapbook of poems representing the career of Eavan Boland, Ireland’s most important and internationally acclaimed contemporary poet. A work of collectible book art, Arc is printed in a limited edition of 200 copies featuring a 100# cover stock imprinted with letterpress imagery and text: an interior on 80# cream paper: hand-sewn binding.
from Witness
What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open.
And the dead walk?
“Boland’s poetry attends to the ordinary with such fidelity and precision that it verges on the visionary… She has risen not only to the front ranks of Irish poetry, but stands at the forefront of a welcome transnational poetics.”
David Rigsbee
from Domestic Violence
1.
It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.
Everything changed the year that we got married.
And after that we moved out to the suburbs.
How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.
And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,
Their voices high, sharp:
nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.
Born in Dublin and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Eavan Boland is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including most recently, New Collected Poems (2008), A Woman Without a Country (2014), and Eavan Boland: A Poet’s Dublin (2016). Among her many awards are a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence from Centenary University, and the Bucknell Medal of Distinction. She is a recipient of the Smartt Family prize from The Yale Review (2002), the John Frederick Nims Award from Poetry (2002), the James Boatwright III Prize from Shenandoah (2007), and the 2012 PEN Award for creative nonfiction. She has received honorary doctorates from University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Strathclyde University Scotland, Bowdoin College, and Colby College. In 2016 Eavan was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. She currently is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, where she directs the creative writing program. Eavan is married to the writer Kevin Casey and has two daughters. She divides her year between California and Dublin.