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“... and Ní Dhomhnaill bear heavily on certain writers who share their gender with the Shan Van Vocht. Eavan Boland, in particular, identifies a double-bind. Maintaining that Irish poets must work in a tradition shaped by nationalism, she observes that the native line is short of women writers. When poets who happen to be women look to the Irish past for ...”

“... allows these two-edged gifts to deflect him from a real, vivid self into a bombastic stance’ (Eavan Boland); ‘I have found Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has ...”

“... work can seem not significantly different from tourist souvenirs, charming and nicely packaged. Eavan Boland’s Selected Poems is one of those carefully pruned volumes in which a poet of quiet, meticulous, patient craft stands revealed as something more interesting and integrated than her individual books had led one to anticipate. She is, like ...”

“... high tide sawlow water drags away.Ní Chuilleanáin stands out even in comparison to poets such as Eavan Boland, who wrote extensively about the injustices of Irish history. Boland gravitates towards emblematic figures, the state personified by a woman, as in her poem ‘Anna Liffey’. Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrators ...”

“... his presence, and poems, could be. ‘I was taken aback by the sheer verve of his idiom,’ Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not ...”

“... we are all children, when we write? I venture into Books Upstairs in Dublin, to find a poem by Eavan Boland. The child in the stroller is ghetto-fabulous in a white babygro complete with hoodie. I am inordinately, sadly proud of the fact that she is clean. We negotiate the steps, we knock over some books. The child does a spectacular crap in the ...”

“... ellipses of Michael Hofmann’s verse (poorly represented here), or the stiff decencies of Eavan Boland (her evocation of rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or ...”

“... from the Book of Kells. ‘That the Science of Cartography. Is Limited’ is among the poems by Eavan Boland added to the latest edition of the Norton, and her title rings true. Maps have always concretised anthologists’ ambivalence about the meaning of ‘English literature’: George Woods’s American anthology The Literature of England ...”

“... her up. She’s been conceived as a latecomer (‘one of the last Victorians’) and a forerunner (Eavan Boland discerned ‘an ominous pre-Auden elegance of tone’ in her work). Perhaps she’s a little like T.S. Eliot’s Cousin Nancy, who smokes and knows all the latest dances: ‘Her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,/But they knew ...”

“... Council’s literature panel in the 1960s), younger poets became more dismissive. They are still: Eavan Boland has mocked his ‘cool, dejected, rosewater poems, with their flowery symbols of transience’. That doesn’t seem quite right: yearning, and its bafflement, is far more present than dejection, and there are echoes of Robert Frost in the ways ...”