CITIZEN POET

How a poet found her vocation and rejoiced in it.

In this collection of essays by influential Irish poet Boland (1944-2020), editor Randolph, a British academic, includes some selections from published prose collections, as well as a number of previously uncollected articles, including a long, unpublished draft of “Daughter,” a powerful piece about motherhood and poetry. “As time went on,” writes Randolph, “Boland’s prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet’s work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critical conversation in which they will eventually be judged.” Autobiography drives many of these early pieces from Boland’s 1995 book, Object Lessons. As a young woman, she had “entered into a life for which poetry has no name.” Nonetheless, before she was 20, she was “sure” she was a poet. She bemoans “lacking the precedent and example of previous Irish women poets.” Other essays examine the political poem, “who writes it and why”; the “fusion of the sexual and the erotic” in her own poems; and the influence of other women poets, especially Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop. In her 2011 book, A Journey With Two Maps, Boland explored how “an apparently monolithic poetic past was transformed into a conversation I could join and change”—as the “radical and disruptive” Elizabeth Barrett Browning had. A mother, Boland enthusiastically resurrects the “domestic poem.” In the last section, there’s a delightful 2003 piece about a “piece of rough magic”—i.e., a computer and Boland’s feelings typing poems into an “unlimited horizon.” A witty 2008 piece touches on the “quirks and absurdities about the poet’s fit in the world.” In another, a despondent Boland wonders, “Why have so few women, in the history of poetry, been citizen-poets?”

This wide-ranging collection is sound testimony to Boland’s “fit” in the world.