SOURCE: Shifrer, Anne. “The Fabrics and Erotics of Eavan Boland's Poetry.” Colby Quarterly 37, no. 4 (December 2001): 309-42.

In the following essay, Shifrer examines the role of fabrics in Boland's poetry.

By focusing on the role of fabrics in Eavan Boland's poetry, I hope to provide readers with a better key to reading Boland's domestic world, one which reveals her demolition of the aesthetic—and its aftermath, in which Boland recuperates the aesthetic for feminine pleasure. There's a logic, I believe, in reading Boland's poems, at first, autoerotically, reveling in the fabrics, the flowers, the colors of twilight. In moving to a deeper understanding, we then can better see how our pleasure arises out of both beauty and barbarism. As we learn to read the language of Boland's fabrics, we discover that the very clothes we wear on our backs point outward to the field of social relations and backwards...