Teaching and Professorial roles
After graduating, Boland held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, prose criticism and essays. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College, Dublin, and Bowdoin College, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at Trinity College Dublin, and at the National Maternity Hospital.
In 1969, Boland married the novelist Kevin Casey, they would have two daughters together. Her experiences as a wife and mother influenced her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes. According to her friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi, she "loved gossip like fish love water."[6]
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she was a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University where she was the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program. She divided her time between Palo Alto and her home in Dublin.
Poetry
Eavan Boland's first book of poetry was New Territory published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This was followed by The War Horse (1975), In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.
Boland was writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, in 1994. During this time she composed 'Night Feed' and 'The Tree of Life', and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.[7][8]
Several of her volumes of poetry have been Poetry Book Society Choices in the UK, where she is primarily published by Carcanet Press.[9] In the United States her publisher is W. W. Norton.
Her poem "Quarantine" was one of 10 poems shortlisted for RTÉ's selection of Ireland's favourite poems of the last 100 years in 2015.[10][11]
Former Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, quoted from her poem "The Emigrant Irish" in his address to the joint houses of the US Congress in May 2008.
On March 15, 2016, President Obama quoted lines from her poem "On a Thirtieth Anniversary" (from "Against Love Poetry" 2001) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate St Patrick's Day.[12]
In March 2018 RTE broadcast a documentary on her life as a poet called "Eavan Boland: Is it Still the Same?".[13] In the same year, Boland was commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy to write the poem "Our future will become the past of other women" to be read at the UN and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of women gaining the vote in Ireland in 1918.[14][15]
Editing and translating
Boland co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). She also published a volume of translations in 2004 called After Every War (Princeton University Press). With Edward Hirsch, she co-edited "The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology of the Sonnet" (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).
