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

Author:   Eavan Boland
Publisher:   Carcanet Press Ltd
ISBN:  

9781857540741


Pages:   272
Publication Date:   27 April 1995
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
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Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time


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Overview

"In this text, Eavan Boland meditates on being a woman and a poet in modern Ireland. In prose, she talks about the challenges of speaking honestly and truly in Ireland - where to be a woman (especially a surburban married woman with children) and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. Boland focuses on ""obstinate details"" that represent larger meanings. The autobiography is not confessional, the facts connect with other voices, other lives. She is uneasy with Modernism and concerned with the erotic. A sense of continuities mark the book, the portrait of a critical imagination moving among history's obstacles, finding itself in the lessons of objects and poems."

Full Product Details

Author:   Eavan Boland
Publisher:   Carcanet Press Ltd
Imprint:   Carcanet Press Ltd
Weight:   0.452kg
ISBN:  

9781857540741


ISBN 10:   1857540743
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   27 April 1995
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  General ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Reviews

"'This is essential reading for any woman interested in poetry.' - Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. 'Object Lessons is a record of a learning process. In a time when poetry by women is coming out of the shadows in Irish literature, such records need to be written and read, in ""turning and returnings"" repeated and re-stated.' - Poetry Ireland Review."


An ultimately lackluster testimony to the truism that art and life can't be separated. One of Ireland's major poets, Boland (In a Time of Violence, 1994, not reviewed) uses personal experience to illustrate a straightforward argument on the poetic life. In the male poetry of the past, she states, the feminine was always muse, nymph, and symbol; by being elevated, woman was reduced to a silent object, with no individual personality or voice. By writing poetry, she argues, women reclaim their own subjectivity and turn the poetic tradition of Britain and Ireland on its head. Female poets then assume the responsibility of reexamining and reworking the traditional relationship between subject and object. To highlight this theme, Boland traces her own growing unease with the seeming discord between her life as a suburban housewife and the one about which she, as a self-identifying political Irish poet, was supposed to write. Unfortunately, the technique used does not do justice to the basic premise. Despite a keen eye for image, Boland's rhetorical style is extremely heavy-handed. She sets out to unwind her argument and story as she would a poem, returning to the same images more than once, until, she states, the argument loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence. Her narrative is repetitious without revealing a new idea or nuance each time, and the majority of her images, although sometimes symbolically potent on their own, are raised and then quickly dropped. The few images she does return to - such as the table where she spent hours as a young woman trying to become a writer or the suburbs where she later lives - don't have the same power as the ones she never fully explores. As a short essay on poetic theory this might have been effective; as a full-length memoir it fails to move. (Kirkus Reviews)


'This is essential reading for any woman interested in poetry.' - Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. 'Object Lessons is a record of a learning process. In a time when poetry by women is coming out of the shadows in Irish literature, such records need to be written and read, in turning and returnings repeated and re-stated.' - Poetry Ireland Review.


Author Information

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She is Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California.

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