Quotes from Eavan Boland

I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.

As soon as I take down her book and open it...My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.

Love will heal What language fails to know

We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

This is what language is: a habitual grief. A turn of speech for the everyday and ordinary abrasion of losses such as this: which hurts just enough to be a scar And heals just enough to be a nation.

Nothing is left in my memory of a summer that promised nothing. except the ominous end of it. But I remember clearly that autumn when darkness came to lend its cover to a killing season seeing at last these ill-at-ease petals estranged from moonlight and still related to it: outcasts of metal, of steel

Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?" said Rilke.

Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?

The opposite of passion is not virtue but routine. - Daphne with her Thighs in Bark

In the end It will not matter That I was a woman. I am sure of it. The body is a source. Nothing more. There is a time for it. There is a certainty About the way it seeks its own dissolution.

I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. -A WOMAN PAINTED ON LEAF (In a Time of Violence)

the secret histories of things deserve to linger, to belong again to the coil of your hair I found once as a child, dried out by shadows, in a shut-tight wooden box

Change depends on the questions we ask. Always providing we are willing to ask them. And a t a certain point, I set out to find those questions.

I entered my reading the way an echo enters a sound.

There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.