A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

"This is a book of being and becoming. It is about being a poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one," writes Eavan Boland. These inspiring essays are both critical and deeply personal, allowing the adventure, passion, and struggle of becoming a woman poet to be viewed from different perspectives. Boland traces her own experiences as a woman, wife, and mother and their effects on her poetry. In the opening essay, she explores the story of her mother, a painter, and her influence on Boland's own concepts of art and womanhood. She examines the work of women poets such as Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sylvia Plath, whose poetry provided light and guidance for her own work. And finally, in "Letter to a Young Woman Poet," she addresses an unseen young poet of the future, and looks to a world where this future artist can change the poetic past as well as the present.

"Acclaimed Irish poet Boland (Domestic Violence) uses 'autobiography and analysis' to trace the making of poets, poems, readers, and their communities. One map reflects her belief that how we read or write a poem is an ever-changing process not rooted in a single point of time but a relationship to the 'poetic past.' The second charts the poet's need to change that past. Sketches of women poets from Puritan Anne Bradstreet to Denise Levertov, the sole woman of the 1960s Black Mountain School, lead to a concluding 'Letter to a Young Woman Poet,' describing Boland's struggle to create poems from her life as a mother. Asserting 'the strengths that exist in the communal life of women,' Boland offers encouragement to women poets of the future. If some of her language is directed to those writing or reading poetry, her vivid imagery ('if this were a summer darkness in Ireland the morning would already be stored in the midnight') will beguile many. (Apr.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

In this volume, Boland (creative writing, Stanford U.), a poet and writer, records the process that led her to become a writer, sharing the works and experiences that transformed her life. The second part of the volume contains her interpretations and personal reflections on ten poets, including Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

An eloquent series of linked essays about the poetic enterprise from "one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century" (Poetry Review).

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin. The author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction, she is a professor and the director of the Creative Writing program at Stanford University.