Eavan Boland was the dream guest for anyone managing a large poetry event. She was gracious and kind with everyone, onstage and backstage, whether signing books, participating in a panel conversation, or being driven to the airport. Whether with Dodge Poetry staff, stage managers, tech crews, students, teachers, poets, caterers, it didn’t matter. She was always the same: considerate, attentive, flexible and unflustered.
Read her memoirs, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet and Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time to understand that this gentleness toward others came from a place of hard-earned strength. In poetry collections like Domestic Violence, Against Love Poetry, In a Time of Violence, and A Woman Without a Country, she looked with unwavering intensity at the troubles of her homeland and of our times.
Eavan Boland will be remembered on the page as one of the great poets of our time, and remembered by all of us at Dodge Poetry as one of those great-hearted individuals we are sometimes lucky enough to encounter in our lives. We will miss her.