Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

by EavanBoland (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.29

  Meditating on being a woman and a poet in modern Ireland, Eavan Boland recounts her early life in Dublin and London, and her later struggle to find a place and a voice in the heavily male literary culture of Ireland. In prose, she talks about the challenges of speaking honestly and truly in a country where to be a woman (especially a suburban married woman with children) and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. Boland's father was a distinguished diplomat, and she learned about Irish history in embassies and drawing-rooms; learned too that as a woman she was offered by her nation no active role to play.

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $15.73

  'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In Object Lessons Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose, the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as Wordsworth's Prelude does in his, though Boland does not allow herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in Object Lessons , an enabling document of our time.Unease with Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it encounters.