An Interview with Eavan Boland

Abstract

Eavan Boland's most recent collection of poetry, The Journey and Other Poems, published in 1987 by Carcanet Press, was lauded in the New York Times Book Review (March 22, 1987), with particular praise for the title poem: I have a feeling, writes the reviewer, Anthony Libby, this moving poem may be one for the ages. Although this is her fifth collection, it is the first that has been made readily available to readers in the United States. Boland is not alone among Irish writers in this respect. The reasons for her relative anonymity are complex and multiple and challenge that principle which is at the heart of the current debate surrounding the idea of a canon in literature-that excellence will out. In response to a question about these issues, Boland discusses the tastes and expectations of the American audience. She suggests that the relationship that has grown up between the two cultures has involved a two-way idealization of artistic figure and product, what she calls a desire for the romantic stance. Although not explicitly examined here, the Anglo-American literary establishment is implicated in the creation of standards by which we read and judge or ignore writing in English from Ireland. Boland, a contemporary of Seamus Heaney, lives and works in Dublin, although at the time of this interview in December 1987, she was in the last month of a visiting fellowship at Bowdoin College. In the last two years, her poetry and articles have appeared regularly in American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Partisan Review, and, more recently, the New Yorker, as well as in Irish journals and English periodicals such as Stand. Until recently, she was a regular reviewer for the arts section of the Irish Times. She teaches at the School for Irish Studies in Dublin, where she encounters many American students,