In a time of violence

The publication of Eavan Boland's Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, established Boland as a significant presence in the contemporary poetry world. This, her seventh volume, continues to mine what she has termed "the meeting place between womanhood and history.". Of this collection she has written: "These poems try to take the gap between rhetoric and reality and study the corruptions and griefs which happen in that space. These are poems about Ireland, about the body, about growing older in both and using each as a text for the other. The time of violence in the title happens in the present and in the past. It happens in the soul and the event. It is that demanding state of process where things are revealed about womanhood and identity which lead on to an investigation - in the title sequence - of the poignant and dangerous mischances between expression and experience.". Eavan Boland's important gift is her ability to traverse both the private and the public worlds that women inhabit. R. T. Smith in the Southern Humanities Review said of her work: "In her relentless excavation of the local events and moments that bear witness to women's legitimate place in history and the interpretative community, Eavan Boland has for a decade brought to light the nature of myths that women have been relegated to." She is a poet of universal depth and authority.