Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time FROM THE PUBLISHER
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. Included are autobiographical pieces about a woman living in Ireland, about a grandmother, a childhood. In the second section, Boland details the part of the life in which the vocation of the poet meets the life of the woman.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
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.
BookList - Patricia Monaghan
One of Ireland's greatest contemporary poets weighs in with a splendid collection of essays woven of sensuous autobiography, convoluted national history, and postmodern literary criticism. If this were a tapestry, its central figure would be a woman surrounded by playing children, burgeoning gardens, and the homey details of family life; she would be posed against a backdrop symbolic of civil war, emigration, and ripening nationalism. But how would we know that woman is a poet? Boland's lifelong project has been to recognize the poet in woman, the woman in poet. In Ireland, woman appears central to poetry, but only as object, especially as an object symbolic of the nation. The ordinary life of family, sexuality, and nurturing love is lived "outside history" (the title of one of Boland's collections of poems) and outside literature as well. What rhetoric will include this formerly excluded life? What form? In her poetry, Boland has answered those questions; here she specifies them in somber and moving detail: the rhetoric must be made of silences as well as speech, and the form must incorporate absences as well as presences. Abstruse as her subject may seem, Boland's crystalline prose makes it accessible and intensely moving.
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