SOURCE: Belanger, Jacqueline. “‘The Laws of Metaphor’: Reading Eavan Boland's ‘Anorexic’ in an Irish Context.” Colby Quarterly 36, no. 3 (September 2000): 242-51.

In the following essay, Belanger maintains that Boland's poem “Anorexic” “best illustrates her attempts to reinsert excluded realities of female experience into an Irish poetic tradition and to explore the implications of the allegorisation of nation as woman.”

In her 1989 pamphlet, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition, Dublin poet Eavan Boland describes her search for a way to locate herself in an Irish poetic tradition and for ways to render her experiences of being an Irish woman into poetry; what she found in this search, however, was what she terms “a rhetoric of imagery which alienated me: a fusion of the national and the feminine which seemed to simplify both” (76). She found a tradition dominated by representations of Ireland as woman, a tradition...