This is an especially welcome consideration of a singular contributor to the contemporary Irish canon. Randolph offers an authoritative, accessible study of Eavan Boland's development as a poet and her work to forge a place for women writers both in Ireland and across the English-speaking world. Randolph's extensive research and close reading of Boland's texts serve to track the poet's growth from her early attachment to Yeats to her personal and political changes and encounters with such significant American poets as Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich. The author notes that fundamental to Boland's success and influence is her use of place and domestic objects to challenge Ireland's poetic genres and traditions. Randolph concludes that Boland's efforts in both prose and poetry create a poetic identity, an alignment of womanhood with nationhood that allows her to move beyond these confinements. Including ample notes and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, this book is both an important resource for scholars of contemporary poetry and a pleasant introduction for the casual reader of recent Irish literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Choice Reviews

The new scholarship has ensured that we now read poems through the highly glazed window of theory. In Allen Randolph’s and Boland’s cases, this is a happy match: this book is a monument to a long and scholarly relationship. . . .The narrative of Allen Randolph’s book is how such a first-rate poet found such a first-rate readership, despite a distance of air miles and cultural background. Allen Randolph seems a generous, expansive intelligence, both analytical and affirming, in a ground-marking work of literary synthesis.

Irish Examiner