Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
“Thoughtfully, Boland recounts the long, uncertain process by which she came to construct (as any poet must) a persona: how she grew out of that well-schooled girl with an unsettled past and a well-received early book, into herself, a wife and mother residing in a Dublin suburb, beginning to write poems of another kind. . . . Eavan Boland has made an honest book and written of intricate matters courteously. She has proposed to her reader a composed, level-headed, yet spirited argument.” (Los Angeles Times)“In a prose style so lyrical, spare and elegiac it rivals poetry, she draws us into personal memory, autobiographical anecdote and family history. . . . It is not like any other book in memory: inspired, relentless, deliberately and eloquently hand-drawn.” (The Nation)“Eavan Boland'sObject Lessons; is the most perceptive account that I have read of what it means to be a woman writing poetry in the late twentieth century.” (Mark Strand)