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A Journey With Two Maps

Becoming A Woman Poet

Eavan Boland

A Journey with Two Maps by Eavan Boland
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Categories: Irish, Memoirs, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847779830
£16.95 £15.25
Paperback
(Pub. Apr 2011)
9781857545418
£16.95 £15.25
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • This is a book of being and becoming. It is about being a poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one.




    A Journey with Two Maps begins with an anecdote: one afternoon, Eavan Boland saw one of her mother’s paintings for sale in a gallery, signed by her famous teacher. It is the starting point for an exploration of concepts of art and womanhood, of what it means to be a woman poet, finding her own voice within a tradition.

    Boland’s discussion is both critical and deeply personal, an account of her development as a poet that traces her experiences as a woman, wife and mother in the light of influences such as Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath. Boland considers the ways in which influences themselves may be changed as a tradition is remade. In the final part of the book, ‘Letter to a Young Woman Poet’, she addresses an unseen poet of the future who will redraw the maps once more, remaking the past and the present.
    Contents

    Preface

    Journeys
    A Journey with Two Maps
    The Rooms of Other Women Poets
    Becoming an Irish Poet
    Reading as Intimidation
    Translating the Underworld
    Domestic Violence

    Maps
    Adrienne Rich
    Elizabeth Bishop: An Unromantic American
    Charlotte Mew: An Introduction
    The Other Sylvia Plath
    The Case of Edna St. Vincent Millay
    Denise Levertov: Letters to a Broken World
    Looking Back and Finding Anne Bradstreet
    Reading Gwendolyn Brooks
    Being an Irish Poet: The Communal Art of Paula Meehan
    A Latin Poet: A Lost Encounter

    Destinations
    Letter to a Young Woman Poet

    Index



    Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She has taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College in Maine, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, ... read more
    Awards won by Eavan Boland Winner, 2020 Costa Poetry Award
    (The Historians)
    Winner, 2017 Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award
     Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others.
    Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011
    Praise for Eavan Boland
    '...She has a dazzling gift for marrying the poem's narrative to its underlying considerations and themes, her carefully enacted restraint heightening the impact of the frequently stunning closing image.'

    Maya C. Popa, Poetry Review

    'The poems, all of them, have that familiar, spare, feel to them - the clarity of cold water, the measured cadence, the plain diction and the leaping insight so characteristic of her mature work - but there is grief here of a depth and of a kind that chills the heart... against the darkness that eddies and gathers in this, the last book we will have from her hand, there is indeed redemptive light'

    Theo Dorgan, Dublin Review of Books

    'This is a fitting tribute to a poet whose work has revised history as we know it and whose talent will be much missed.'

    Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin

    'The first poem in Boland's book, The Fire Gilder, is one of the best Irish poems of the past half-century.'

    Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times

    'Truly consumable, enjoyable and emotive... all the things that great poetry should be.'

    Jasmine Reads, YouTube

    '[The Historians] zooms in with characteristic musicality and intelligence on what the stories that are often overlooked - those of women'

    Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Poetry Books of the Year 2020

    'It is, as came to be expected from Boland, filled with stories of ordinary Irish women, sensitively rendered in her understated verse. In revisiting the otherwise erased experiences of her subjects, Boland asks us to reconfigure our own understanding of the past, though she acknowledges the difficulties of that, too'
    The New Statesman
    'There's a poignancy here that is hard to avoid... This modest collection is welcome and those who have not read Boland - few though they may be - will find here at least an introduction to her always-potent art. For others, it will serve as a coda to a poetic life well lived.'
    Books Ireland Magazine
    'It feels, reading it in the wake of her death, to be unsettlingly prophetic, a fitting close to the life's work of a great poet'
    Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times
    '... a rich, unsettling moral adventure in memory and responsibility.'
    Theo Dorgan
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