Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland was an Irish poet, essayist, editor, and teacher who changed how domestic life and women’s experience entered modern Irish poetry. New Selected Poems gathers work from a career that began with 23 Poems and continued through collections including Night Feed, The Journey, The Lost Land, and Code. Carcanet describes the volume as a half-century selection shaped by language, history, passion, and the body. Boland’s poems repeatedly bring public narratives into conversation with kitchens, suburbs, motherhood, myth, and personal memory. She taught in Ireland and the United States, eventually directing Stanford University’s creative writing program, and she coedited The Making of a Poem with Mark Strand. Her criticism and poetry remain closely linked by a sustained argument that inherited literary traditions must make room for lives and voices they once excluded.