Contact: Kathie Dibell
570-577-3260
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Irish Poet to Speak at Bucknell's Commencement
LEWISBURG, Pa. -- Eavan Boland, described as one of Ireland's most influential poets, will be the speaker at Bucknell's 150th commencement May 21, President William D. Adams announced Wednesday.
Boland, who has published nine books of poetry, first spoke at Bucknell in September at the start of the university's Irish Focus Semester.
"Anyone who heard her powerful reading or attended her lecture last fall will no doubt welcome her return to campus for commencement," Adams said. "She eloquently writes of Irish history, identity and violence, but with a contemporary perspective that goes beyond the traditional Irish heroic and bardic tradition. She speaks to and for those Irish not often heard from in Irish literature -- the women, the emigrants, the poor. And in so doing, speaks to all of the human condition."
Adams noted that it is particularly appropriate for a poet to address the some 800 graduates at commencement. Bucknell's Stadler Center for Poetry, established in 1981, is one of the very few undergraduate poetry centers in the nation.
Boland said of her fall trip to Bucknell, "I was immediately struck and also very touched by the wonderful hospitality, the sparkling conversation and the seriousness and warmth of the students and faculty I spoke to.
"The Stadler Center in particular has a very distinctive atmosphere which makes it both welcoming and challenging, not an easy combination to arrange, but one which seems characteristic of the ethos of Bucknell. I look forward greatly to returning as commencement speaker."
Boland's most recent book of poetry, "The Lost Land," published in 1998, documents the suffering of the people of the her troubled homeland. "I have written down ... their human pain. / Their ghostly weeping," Boland said.
Denis Donoghue of the New York Review of Books has said, "Boland has emerged as one of the best poets in Ireland."
Jan Garden Castro, writing in The Nation, said, "Boland combines impeccable craft, resilient metaphors and, above all, moral authority to witness human difficulties."
Jody Allen Randolph of the Irish Times has written, "Eavan Boland is one of those rare figures who .. has influenced the course of poetry during her own lifetime ... she is increasingly officialized as one of the more important poets to emerge internationally over the past 30 years."
Boland explores and celebrates the everyday in lives of ordinary women, saying she is an "indoor nature poet. And my lexicon (is) the kettle and steam, and the machine in the corner and the kitchen, and the baby's bottle."
She has compared the historic colonial status of Ireland, under English rule, to what she says has been the colonial status of women, dominated in literature and life by men.
Boland calls herself a feminist, but not a feminist poet. "... feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic. My poetry begins for me where certainty ends. I think the imagination is an ambiguous and untidy place, and its frontiers are not accessible to the logic of feminism for that reason," Boland has said.
Asked about the role or place of the poet in the 21st century, Boland told an interviewer, "In Ireland the poet is communal, sometimes public, with quite a bardic shadow about the whole thing. In America, almost the opposite is true. Poets often seem to feel isolated ... American poets feel too isolated and Irish poets not isolated enough. I think the isolation -- the sundering of communal links and all the loneliness and self-questioning that results from that -- has led to a glorious century of experiment. In Ireland ... poets are still part of their community ... but there isn't as much experiment. There isn't as much self-questioning."
Boland was born in Dublin in 1944, the daughter of diplomat Frederick H. Boland and artist Frances Kelly. She spent her childhood in London where her father was the ambassador to the Court of St. James and her early adolescence in New York while he represented Ireland in the United Nations. She graduated from Trinity College in Ireland.
Boland divides her time between Dublin and Stanford University where she is professor of English and director of the university's creative writing program. She is married to Irish novelist Kevin Casey; they have two grown daughters, Sarah and Eavan.
The themes of exile and emigration pervade her poetry. "The expatriate is in search of a country; the exile in search of a self," she has said. One of the poems in "The Lost Land," reads: "I imagine myself/at the landward rail of that boat/ searching for the last sight of a hand./ I see myself on the underworld side of that water,/the darkness coming in fast, saying/all the names I know for a lost land."
Her poetry books are: "The Lost Land," "In a Time of Violence," "Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990," "New Territory," "The War Horse," "In Her Own Image," "Night Feed," "The Journey," and "An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987." Her prose writings include "Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time." She has also co-authored "Y.B. Yeats" and is co-editor of "The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms."
Boland has lectured and traveled extensively in the United States. Her poems and essays have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review.
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Contact Person: Kathie Dibell, [email protected]
(Note: Ms. Boland's first name is pronounced Ee-van.)
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