Eavan Boland Poetry Quotes

. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.

I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in. -A WOMAN PAINTED ON LEAF (In a Time of Violence)

Nocturne" After a friend has gone I like the feel of it: The house at night. Everyone asleep. The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening. One-o-clock. A floral teapot and a raisin scone. A tray waits to be taken down. The landing light is off. The clock strikes. The cat comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs, a black ambivalence around the legs of button-back chairs, an insinuation to be set beside the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup, the saucer with the thick spill of tea which scalds off easily under the tap. Time is a tick, a purr, a drop. The spider on the dining-room window has fallen asleep among complexities as I will once the doors are bolted and the keys tested and the switch turned up of the kitchen light which made outside in the back garden an electric room -- a domestication of closed daisies, an architecture instant and improbable.

I spent one full hour convincing some friends that women said poems in Ireland before Eavan Boland. The women friends are suspicious. They have English degrees.

Change depends on the questions we ask. Always providing we are willing to ask them. And a t a certain point, I set out to find those questions.

I entered my reading the way an echo enters a sound.