Eavan Boland — Irish poet mentored writers at Stanford
Eavan Boland, an Irish poet with a precise wit that educated and captivated students on the Stanford University campus for 25 years and across the Atlantic Ocean for far longer, died April 27 after suffering a stroke in her native Dublin.
Boland, director of Stanford’s creative writing program, had gone home to ride out the coronavirus pandemic with family while teaching an undergraduate course in 20thcentury Irish literature remotely. Her death at age 75 came on the day one of her poems was published in the New Yorker. Called “Eviction,” the poem deals with her grandmother being booted from her apartment more than a century ago, and will be part of the collection “Historians” due for publication this fall.
Her death was confirmed by Robert O’Driscoll, consul general of Ireland, in San Francisco, who studied Boland’s work while growing up in Dublin.
“Eavan in my mind is the preeminent female Irish poet, and one of the great Irish poets,” said O’Driscoll on Sunday. “Everyone in Ireland from the age of 16 to 18 studies Boland right along with Shakespeare and Dickinson.”
Modest and selfeffacing, Boland was more interested in promoting the work of other poets than her own, said Maria Hummel, who pursued a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford specifically to study under Boland, and is now a professor of creative writing at the University of Vermont.
Hummel said Boland routinely turned down pleas to read her poetry in class or on campus in general. But when she finally relented, it was a major event that packed a large auditorium. Hummel attended one of these events 10 years ago, and it sticks with her still.
“It was an unforgettable experience,” said Hummel. “She read her poems in these low, measured tones that mimicked the way people read out loud to themselves. Her delivery drew the hundreds of us who were there listening into the intimate space she created.”
Boland was born and raised mostly in Dublin, the youngest of five children. Her father, Frederick Boland, was a diplomat who became Irish ambassador to the United
Kingdom and later Irish ambassador to the United Nations. The family lived in London and New York, and though Boland did not herself grow up in impoverished circumstances, she often wrote as if she had.
She had an “old soul” as they say and her first collection “23 Poems” was published when she was just 18. It was the first of 10 volumes. Boland served as writerinresidence at Trinity College in Dublin and University College Dublin, and was recruited to Stanford’s Department of English faculty in 1996.
Boland taught both undergraduates and graduate students along with nondegree students in the famed Stegner program, which offers a twoyear fellowship on campus and has attracted writers Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone and Tobias Wolff, who joined the faculty one year after Boland.
“She was a monument of Irish poetry but I never heard her say one word about herself,” said Wolff on Sunday. “She was the least selfimportant writer I have ever known.”
Like Wolff, Boland lived in a home on campus. Her husband, novelist Kevin Casey, remained in Dublin, as did their adult daughters, Sarah and Eavan. Boland was always going back and forth and was in demand to read her poetry across the United States and abroad, but when she was on campus she was dedicated completely to the Stanford family and always available in her campus office, Wolff said. He always made a point of stopping by Boland’s secondfloor office, which was overstuffed with books and usually overstuffed with laughs.
“She was great fun and always funny,” said Wolff. “She was the beating heart of the creative writing program.”
In addition to her administrative duties at Stanford, Boland taught a full course load and still found time to be consistently creative. While at Stanford, she published “A Woman Without a Country, New Collected Poems,” and “Domestic Violence.” She also wrote “Quarantine,” about a husband and wife in the Irish potato famine. Published in the 2001 collection “Code,” it has been listed among the 10 most popular Irish poems of the past 100 years.
“In the morning they were both found dead,” it reads. “Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.”
She also published two volumes of prose: “Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time” and “A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet.” She also coauthored “The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms” with Mark Strand.
Boland was an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Irish Academy of Letters. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards in 2017. In 2019, Boland was commissioned by the Irish government to write a poem to mark the centennial of women’s suffrage. She delivered it at a St. Brigid’s Day event at the consulate in San Francisco, with 250 people in attendance. The poem is titled “Our Future will Become the Past of Other Women.”
“Show me your hand. I see our past, Your palm roughened by heat, by frost. By pulling a crop out of the earth, By lifting a cauldron off the hearth,” it began. “... Remind us now again that history changes in one moment with one mind. That it belongs to us, to all of us. As we mark these hundred years. We will not leave you behind.”
Boland leaves behind her husband and daughters, and all of her students and former students at Stanford and throughout the Republic of Ireland, noted Michael Higgins, president of Ireland.
“With the passing of Eavan Boland, Ireland has lost not only an internationally acclaimed poet, distinguished academic and author, but one of the most insightful inner sources of Irish life, not only in life as expressed but as sensed and experienced,” Higgins said in a statement.
Details for a Stanford memorial to celebrate her life will be provided at a later date.
Her former student, Hummel, eulogized her in a series of tweets that read like poetry. “It came to me last night what #EavanBoland was for many of us,” was the first one, posted April 29. “In the old tales, the godmother was not a giggling witch, but the guardian and guide to your transformation. The figure who appeared in your darkest hour. The one who sheltered you.”