In 1962, when Eavan Boland began her studies at Trinity, the college had The Eavan Boland Library is a home That early sense of not belonging became a vital source of energy in her writing. just unveiled the competition-winning design for the New Library by the young for all of us Most o en it is understood, rightly, as an aspect of her feminism and of her deeply architect Paul Koralek. By the time ethical view of history and those whose President Éamon de Valera o icially stories are le out of the o icial record. opened the Library in 1967, Boland had graduated with First But, in her contribution to a panel discussion celebrating Class honours and had taken up a junior lectureship. That Boland’s work in the week of the Library’s naming, same year she published her first full-length collection of Boland’s fellow poet and close contemporary at Trinity, poems, New Territory . A decade later, when the college decided Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, recalled another way in which she in 1978 to name the Library a er George Berkeley, Boland was didn’t quite fit into the literary scene at the university in the a prominent cultural figure in Ireland: a regular broadcaster 1960s: she was a poet who didn’t drink. on RTÉ and contributor to the Irish Times , an editor with the trailblazing feminist press Arlen House, and author of another book of poems, The War Horse (1975). Over the next five decades a further ten collections, and major works of prose criticism, would establish her reputation in Ireland, the US and around the world as a cherished, trusted, and consistently conscientious voice, until her unexpected death in 2020. In another sense, Boland was very close to the life of the college: her father Frederick, a prominent diplomat in the early decades of the State, served as Chancellor from 1964 until 1982. But when she recalls Trinity in her writing, it is always with a keen sense of the city beyond its walls and the complexities of its colonial and postcolonial histories, and a refusal to let these lie without confronting what they The stories of Boland’s career and of the Library share might have meant for people in the past, and what they common features. The challenge for Koralek was to propose might mean for us. a modern building which would be at once distinct from and harmonious with the architecture of history and tradition which surrounded it, and he pulled this o with a work of undiluted Brutalism. Boland was, from her earliest days as a writer, a faithful student of poetry’s traditions: she would later recall the hours she spent in the National Library absorbing the work of the great canonical poets. But, finding no place for herself or her own experience within those traditions, she built new kinds of poems, determined to reshape the art in her own image, so that other poets might do so in theirs. It is Boland’s openness to the full story – and her willingness to question herself, as well as received opinion or established tradition – which makes the selection of her name for the Library such an inspired, heartening and responsible one. In her poem Anna Li ey , performed beautifully by students in a film made to celebrate the naming of the Library, Boland urges us to 'consider rivers [.] from the first moment, they are going home'. The Eavan Boland Library is a home for all of us – and for our questions.
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