Citizen Poet: New and Selected Essays

This potent posthumous anthology brings together prose pieces by Irish poet Boland (The Historians), who died in 2020 at age 75, largely focused on the plight of women poets. In one 2011 piece, Boland discusses Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s contentious relationship with her father as a metaphor for women poets’ ambivalent relationship with the patriarchal poetic tradition they simultaneously draw from and challenge. Boland also frequently explores the intersection of nation, poetry, and womanhood, as in “A Woman Without a Country,” where she suggests that women’s historical exclusion from politics and citizenship explains why they rarely take up questions of national identity in their poems, and in “Outside History,” which contends that the tendency of Irish male poets to use women in their poems as metaphors for the country flattens and oversimplifies both. Of particular interest is the unfinished and previously unpublished “Daughter,” a collection of letters, journal entries, and stray stanzas by Boland and other writers that uses its hodgepodge design to convey the “incoherence” Boland felt striving to balance her career with motherhood. The discerning essays attest to Boland’s keen sense of how poetry intersects with social and political issues, offering insight into the philosophy that undergirded her craft. Poetry lovers should take note. (Sept.)