A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

by Eavan Boland

Overview

“Boland offers encouragement to women poets of the future. . . . Her vivid imagery will beguile many.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

These inspiring essays from the celebrated poet Eavan Boland are both critical and deeply personal, revealing the adventure, passion, and struggle of becoming a woman poet. In this thematic sequel to her classic Object Lessons, Boland traces her own experiences as a woman, wife, and mother and their effect on her poetry, and she looks to a world where she can change the poetic past as well as the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393342321
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/07/2012
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eavan Boland (1944—2020) was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Outside History and several volumes of nonfiction, and was coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, among other honors. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and Stanford University, where she was the director of the creative writing program.

Editorial Reviews

"[A Journey with Two Maps] attempts to rewrite history in a more fair and truthful manner. Boland’s insights into Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop are exquisite. . . . Boland’s criticism is spooky with hovering ghosts."

San Francisco Chronicle

"Boland . . . discusses the work of women poets that has been important to her, ranging from the little-known Charlotte Mew to the over-exposed Sylvia Plath, in critical essays that connect seamlessly with the personal to create a provocative collection."

Booklist

Acclaimed Irish poet Boland (Domestic Violence) uses "autobiography and analysis" to trace the making of poets, poems, readers, and their communities. One map reflects her belief that how we read or write a poem is an ever-changing process not rooted in a single point of time but a relationship to the "poetic past." The second charts the poet's need to change that past. Sketches of women poets from Puritan Anne Bradstreet to Denise Levertov, the sole woman of the 1960s Black Mountain School, lead to a concluding "Letter to a Young Woman Poet," describing Boland's struggle to create poems from her life as a mother. Asserting "the strengths that exist in the communal life of women," Boland offers encouragement to women poets of the future. If some of her language is directed to those writing or reading poetry, her vivid imagery ("if this were a summer darkness in Ireland the morning would already be stored in the midnight") will beguile many. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly