“An Un-Romantic American,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1988, pp. 73-92.

In the following essay, Boland argues that Bishop is “the one un-Romantic American poet of her generation.”

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American poetry was a rare commodity in the Dublin bookshops of the sixties and seventies. It could turn up, unpredictably and at random, slanted in with books of British verse and Yugoslavian translation, so that the mode of its appearance had an adverse effect on the nature of its readership. Not surprisingly perhaps, my first encounter with Elizabeth Bishop's work was not in a bookshop at all. I came across her poem “The Moose” in an anthology of American verse I had been sent for review. I read the first stanza and read it again. I read the second and marked the place. Later that night, with the children in their cots and the house quiet, I began to...