Object Lessons: Reflections of a Woman and a Poet in Her Time (Lives and Letters)

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.