Eavan Boland resource: A Poet's Dublin

An excellent addition to web resources on the poet Eavan Boland (often on the Leaving Certificate course), is a new site called A Poet's Dublin, created by the Illuminations gallery at Maynooth University, as part of an exhibition of the poet's work and photography. There are audio recordings and commentaries by the poet, and also critical commentaries by other writers/critics.  

Here's her beautiful poem 'The Pomegranate'.

We've add the site to our list of helpful resources on Boland.

Eavan Boland resources

Another post summarising useful resources for the Leaving Certificate, which will be updated every now and then (see our Hamlet page here), this time on the Irish poet Eavan Boland.

1. Our own podcast on her poem 'This Moment' [8.32 minutes].
2. The text of 'The Pomegranate'.
3. A Poet's Dublin: site from Maynooth University with recordings and commentaries.
4. An interview with Elizabeth Schmidt.
5. The Skoool.ie page: brief biography, and commentary.
6. The Wikipedia page, with plenty of links at the bottom (the usual cautionary note about facts on Wikipedia...)
7. Scoilnet extract from Object Lessons on being a female Irish poet, with questions
8. US Colleges TV Video of reading and talk by Boland ['The Pomegranate' from 6:20]
9. Reading at Cornell University [YouTube, starts with Boland at 15:00]

[updated September 2016. Some dead links]

Podcast 17: 'This Moment' by Eavan Boland

Half-term starts today, so it's that great time, when we can dive into books for a week or so. After half-term, we have a lot of really good pupil writing to post here; some excellent material is promised. Meanwhile, our VI form are preparing for their Mock exams, so this seems an appropriate time to produce another poetry revision podcast.

Our 17th podcast is the second in a series dealing with individual poems on the Leaving Certificate course (following the first on Yeats's 'The Wild Swans at Coole'). This one deals with 'This Moment' by the contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland, examining how this apparently simple lyric achieves its memorable impact, and quoting from Boland's own comments and other writing.

Listen to the podcast via the player below:-

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You can also listen to our podcasts via the 'widget' on the sidebar to the right, or by visiting our podcast page here (if you have iTunes on your computer you can also subscribe by clicking here, and so download our episodes to your MP3 player, or by searching for 'SCC English' in the iTunes Store).

Eavan Boland

We're just back from a weekend 'Exodus' out of school, during which Head of Department John Fanagan went to the the annual Poetry School weekend in London, and writes :-

'I attended a wonderful seminar run by Eavan Boland whose poetry I was teaching to my sixth form a couple of weeks ago. She spoke of the creation and use of image in poetry and contended strongly that, like the appendix in the human body, the simile is now redundant. Using poems by Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and her own 'Black Lace Fan', she examined the power of metaphor as an organic part of the poem. We were encouraged to give our views: I argued with her about the compass simile in Donne's 'A Valediction : forbidding mourning', which I love and she doesn't.

At a reception afterwards I spoke to her for a while and found her very engaging. She is a wonderful teacher and the seminar was exciting and stimulating. The Poetry School is at www.poetryschool.com.'

There are useful links to Boland, one of the Leaving Certificate poets, on the Norton Poets site, and an interview in Caffeine Destiny here. One of the prescribed poems on our course is the beautiful 'The Pomegranate', here. Shortly available in the Library : the newly published Eavan Boland Sourcebook.