Eavan Boland

New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

Nine years after I had my own accident, I find that in trying to go back to doing those things that I used to do just doesn't fit. Everything seems to just fall apart. I don't know why but I think it is because I am this new creature.