At her death in 2020, Eavan Boland left a formidable body of work – poems and prose. Together hey transformed Irish poetry and had a considerable impact throughout the English-speaking world. She was also a major feminist thinker and essayist. She challenged and changed Irish culture and society. This collection of her most important essays combines autobiographical and critical reflections on the events and influences that shaped her life and work. It includes work never before collected, as well as draft chapters of the memoir, Daughter, that she was working on when she died.

The book opens with substantial extracts from Object Lessons: the life of the woman and the poet in our times (1995), including ‘Outside History’ and ‘The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma’. From A Journey with Two Maps: becoming a woman poet (2011) Jody Allen Randolph, her longtime friend and editor, selects the title essay and ‘Becoming an Irish Poet’, ‘Domestic Violence’ and the celebrated ‘Letter to a Young Woman Poet’. The Uncollected Essays are full of surprises from each period of her life. The introduction tells the intertwined stories of her life and her writing, her sense of Ireland and exile, and her evolving insights into how the poet can earn, widen and share her freedoms. ‘As time went on,’ Randolph writes, ‘Boland’s prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet’s work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critique by which they will eventually be judged.’