When I first read the work of Eavan Boland in the early 2000s, I recognized her as a formidable proponent of domestic realism, one whose “Ode to Suburbia,” “Night Feed,” and “The Pomegranate” seemed to reinforce her reputation as the poet responsible for ushering washing machines and nappies into the Irish lyric. I recognized, too, her talent for rendering legend and the interior lives of women; a writer unafraid to acknowledge that literary custom had for too long “handled the feminine image in a way which made the action expressive while the image was silent and passive” (Object Lessons). As a former dancer who’d internalized the noxious effects of being valued as decorative, someone who’d disappeared—as per centuries-old traditions—quietly into the corps de ballet, I admired Eavan’s investment in making space for those who’d been too narrowly viewed or unheard. “You can see nothing of her, but her head,” she imagines of a young mother seated in the dark at a writing table somewhere in the future, “bent over the page, her hand moving, / moving again, and her hair. / I wrote like that once. / But this is different: / This time, when she looks up, I will be there” (“Is It Still the Same”).      

While my initial impressions of Eavan’s subversiveness proved somewhat accurate, it was only after working closely with her at Stanford University that I came to see her principal subject not as womanhood or even marginalization, but power. What, she often asked my cohort of Wallace Stegner Fellows, was being memorialized or made into myth—either cultural or personal—and to the benefit or expense of whom? Eavan was suspicious of empty gestures, “orchestrated” resonance, and artifice. The daughter of a diplomat and Expressionist painter, she instinctively understood the tangled interplay between rhetoric and image. She cautioned young poets against the seductive power of beauty, warning that cadences could be made to uphold tiered systems or dangerous ideologies. Given the early isolation she experienced as an expat in England and America—her girlhood marked by exile and practiced decorum—she knew stylized diction could be exploited to serve both the institution and empire. Not too surprisingly, she resisted easy epiphanies, and railed against irony and simile. Both devices, she maintained, created an “unnecessary distance” between the speaker and subject. Instead, she valued nuance earned via clarity. Why not just “let the thing be”? 

While editing “The Door Left Wide,” I tried to keep in mind Eavan’s insistence that language’s exhilaration mustn’t distract us from its exclusions: that in the poem’s reflection of place, culture, memory, or time, we must consider, always, not only what’s being seen but who isn’t. Reading Annette Skade’s “Current,” for instance, a harrowing account of “living couples tied together, thrown / [by English soldiers] into the sound off Foilnamuck,” I was startled into attention as the poem shifts its focus from blue water and wind off the coast of County Cork to the final stanza in which history, recast via the image of a dead calf, resurfaces “glooping like an empty bin bag.” Here, I thought, are parts of speech matter-of-factly holding up an unalterable past while proving it inextricable from the present. The simultaneity of this perspective—of looking and looking back—is likewise evident in Elaine Feeney’s darkly humorous and triumphant love poem, “When We Concluded”; Simon Costello’s urgent narrative, “Saturn Devouring”; and Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “Dynamite Comes from a Greek Verb,” an etymological homage to power. Of course, in choosing selections for “The Door Left Wide,” I was also drawn to work which echoes, however indirectly, Eavan’s oeuvre. The bronze plaque honoring a Dublin council member in Caroline Bracken’s “Fame” rushes to mind Eavan’s sonnet on the statue of an Irish patriot (“Heroic”). Molly Twomey’s “Lunch,” which narrates disordered eating and recovery, is in dialogue with Eavan’s willful “Anorexic.” Gail McConnell, Eoghan Walls, Jessica Traynor, and Victoria Kennefick contribute poems on parenthood, while Conor Cleary, Edel Burke, Nessa O’Mahony, and Eleanor Hooker, among others, match Eavan’s efforts to differentiate Ireland’s invisible “past” from history’s familiar annals.

For more than a year, I pored through hundreds of submissions from Irish writers and long-term residents of the country, often discovering that the cover letters—spanning cities and continents, and reflecting a wide range of ages and publishing experience—mapped further records of influence as their respective authors noted the myriad roles Eavan played as an editor, advocate, neighbor, professor, email correspondent, friend, critic, A-level course subject, and public figure. I was moved by the depth of such testimonies, which included recollections of Eavan gossiping and making jokes backstage at a literary festival to ease the nerves of fellow participants. Or the confidence she instilled by being the first to publish a young writer’s work during her tenure at Poetry Ireland. There were remembrances of Eavan’s generosity, insightful criticism, and combativeness in workshops dating back to the 1970s. A mother who’d given birth during the pandemic shared that she’d chosen Eavan as her daughter’s namesake. Still another recounted how Eavan’s tempered “scolding” had instilled in her a rich sense of purpose, discipline, and artful ambition that had lasted for decades. More often than not, however, the letters expressed gratitude for Eavan’s poetry and prose: praise for, among others, A Woman without a Country, “Quarantine,” “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” A Journey with Two Maps, and her posthumous volume, The Historians, each of which had provided what admirers cited not only as poetic companionship, but a recognizable record of their very existence. 

Perhaps this sense of recognition stems from the fact that Eavan consistently interrogated that against which the word “poet” has been historically opposed. Rather than replicate traditions that held many people at a distance from the art, Eavan wrote poems she—and those like her—could live “inside.” Born in Dublin in 1944, she came up in male-dominated literary circles, and her radical insistence on the rightful place of a fully realized female self in poetry pushed her toward an expansiveness that revised the Irish lyric; the impetus being “to re-examine and disrupt and dispossess,” she explained, “[n]ot because of feminism, not because of ideology, but because of poetry” (Object Lessons). While directing the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, she continued to press convention to move the art forward, demonstrating her support of queerness, writers of color, and the working class. She was also quite funny. During the Stegner workshop, her break-time patter included offhand quips that ran the gamut from technology and reality television to foodies and fashion at the National Book Awards. Our private (and far more personal) conversations, which often occurred spur of the moment in her office in Margaret Jacks Hall, were equally unpredictable and filled with fascinating contradictions. On those sunlit afternoons, the scent of California’s eucalyptus and live oaks drifting through an open window, Eavan proved herself less interested in protecting tradition than pursuing an honest assessment of poetry’s future. While she could be exacting and adversarial, I valued her rigorous vision and unwavering support. Given her ethics of attention, Eavan taught me the importance of (self-)perspective, as well as the value of recognizing the underlying implications of that which seemingly rests in plain sight. 

In 2017, at a London event hosted by the Irish Poetry Society, on the last afternoon I shared with her in person, I heard Eavan insist—as she had several times throughout the seventeen-plus years I knew her—that the poem’s co-author is the reader: a statement I take to mean that, by bringing language to life within the mind and via the breath, the lyric is ferried from its private origins in the writer’s imagination into the present moment where it meets the ear of an audience and is, at last, complete. As you read the following selections aloud—whether the poems are elegiac or epistolary, formal or narrative, drawn from history or nature—my hope is that you will experience this notion of continuity and communion as twenty-two Irish poets, along with scholar-biographer Jody Allen Randolph, honor Eavan Boland, who via her personhood and poetry contended that, within the open rooms of the lyric—“the door left wide” (Domestic Violence)—here “[isn’t] I any longer, but we.”

—Shara Lessley