Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
by Eavan Boland
published
July 1996
by W. W. Norton & Company
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binding
Paperback, 254 pages
isbn
0393314375
(isbn13: 9780393314373)
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 81)
Funnily enough, I don't particularly care for several of the poems that Boland is most famous for. However, this is one of those rare cases where the quotes on the outside of the book from reviewers are spot on...in particular, the one that mentioned "its serpentine strategy of memoir lifted into epiphany." How true! Take the care poets give to each word in a poem, and multiply that into a novel. Some of the prose is just fantastically beautiful. Of course, Boland's struggles with reco...more
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Object Lessons is history, memoir, and literary criticism. Weaving together a personal narrative of family history and coming of age as a young poet in college in Dublin, Boland introduces the poets that fascinated her, the arguments that teased her, and the misleading romantic visions of Irish nationalism that appeared to include her -- yet only conditionally made room for her as a poet as well as a woman. While I found the book less helpful in terms of future research on women's late 20th poet...more
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"But already I knew--from a few mysterious moments of writing--something about form. Already I sensed that real form--the sort that made time turn and wander when you read a poem--came from a powerful meeting between a hidden life and a hidden chance in language. If they found each other, then each could come out of hiding" (Boland 116).
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Eavan Boland spoke my mind and my feelings as she described the inner struggles of her two paths in life. I began this book sitting in a Irish lit class, and kept looking around the room to see if others felt that shocking sense of connection. Ever since that day, I am a huge Eavan Boland fan.
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Read in November, 2007
A stunning look at the experience of an Irish woman poet that simultaneously examines the human quest for identity, the complications of nationhood, and the limits of language. One of those life-changing books for me...read at exactly the right moment.
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Read in January, 2001
This is more nonfiction (craft theory) than memoir, but it reads like a poem.
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