Today the Irish Poet Anne Fitzgerald pays a wonderful tribute to Ireland’s late great Poet Eavan Boland, to mark the first anniversary of her death on April 27th 2020.
Here Anne reads some of Eavan’s beautiful poems from her collection ‘In A Time Of Violence’ and Anne talks about how Eavan inspired her to become a Poet. Anne also reads one of her own recent poems ‘Eye and Ear’.
About Eavan Boland
Born in Dublin in 1944, over the course of her career Eavan Boland emerged as one of the foremost and most distinguished female Poets in Irish literature. Her first book of poems was published in 1967. She has taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland’s previous works include The Journey and other poems (1986), Night Feed (1994), Against Love Poetry, ( 2001), An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (1996), In a Time of Violence (1994), Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990 (1990), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001).
In addition to her books of poetry, Boland was also the author of Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995), a volume of prose, and she was co-editor of The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000). Her last prose book was A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2011).
Boland’s poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review and she was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times.
About Anne Fitzgerald
Dublin born Poet Anne Fitzgerald is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poetry collections are ‘Swimming Lessons’ (Wales, Stonebridge, 2001), ‘The Map of Everything’ (Dublin, Forty Foot, 2006), ‘Beyond the Sea’, (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and ‘Vacant Possession’ (Salmon Press 2017)
In 2006 Anne founded Forty Foot Press. She is a recipient of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Writer-in-Residence bursary at The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. She teaches Creative Writing in Ireland and North America. Anne lives by the sea in Sandycove, Dublin.
Anne’s poetry is hugely admired throughout Ireland, North America and Europe. Her admirers include Ireland’s great playwright Frank McGuinness, who asks “Is there a poet writing in Ireland who feels so profoundly and knows more surely love’s obsessions, its piercing chronicles, its succour and sorrows than Anne Fitzgerald? The poems in Vacant Possession char the page, leaving their imprint, imperishable, unique.”
In 2020 Anne did a poetry reading from her collection ‘Vacant Possession’ especially for ICC Digital; to watch this reading go to: https://icc.fswd.uk/2020/06/24/anne-fitzgerald-poetry-reading/
Anne’s Website: www.fortyfootpress.com/anne-fitzgerald.html
Facebook: www.facebook.com/FortyFootPress.2006/
