Forging a path for herself in the male dominated field of Irish poetry, Eavan Boland is a delightful spark of an author. Her poems are challenging, in that they're very essence is confrontational. Boland wanted to be a poet because she was a woman who liked to write, but this decision entailed a revolutionary shift in Irish culture. In fact she writes the poem "Becoming Anne Bradstreet" to explain her inspiration. She desired to become to Ireland what Bradstreet, the British female poet moved to the American colonies, is to England: subversive. Boland's straightforward relationship to her art and the sincerity with which she presents her femininity have nevertheless won the hearts and minds of her colleagues.
Although Boland does not describe herself as a feminist poet, her poetry necessarily involves a discussion of feminism. She is participating in the movement just by producing her art so tenderly. Poems like "The Pomegranate," "Domestic Violence," and "Irish Interior" all address the experience of womanhood as she has discovered it. Interestingly enough, she neither embraces the feminist movement in her writing nor refrains from gender-coding her poems. She finds a middle ground, writing from a thoroughly feminine perspective, mirroring the sincerity which won Bradstreet the respect of her male colleagues as well.
Boland identifies first as an Irish poet, secondly as a female poet. Ireland is her focus. She writes countless poems about Irish history, often focusing on the various revolutions and wars which have occurred there. In keeping with poems like "In which the ancient history I learn is not my own," she expresses indignation over Ireland's British ownership. Even so these ideas are presented through a maternal sense of tenderness. Boland does not desire conflict for its own sake but because she feels the role of the protective mother over her proverbial child "Ireland."
