SOURCE: Atfield, Rose. “Postcolonialism in the Poetry and Essays of Eavan Boland.” Women: A Cultural Review 8, no. 2 (spring 1997): 168-82.

In the following essay, Atfield considers the issue of postcolonialism in Boland's verse.

Postcolonialism in the poetry of Eavan Boland is a process of the recognition and exposure of colonialism: its denial and repression of identity, and the restoration and reconstruction of that identity in terms of place, history and literary tradition. Boland established a sense of dual postcolonialism when, in the Ronald Duncan lecture for the Poetry Book Society, she referred to ‘two identities’ which ‘shape and reshape what I have to say’. ‘I am an Irish poet and a woman poet. In the first category I enter the tradition of the English language at an angle. In the second, I enter my own tradition at an even more oblique angle’ (Boland 1994b).

Boland employs a traditional representation...