SOURCE: Conboy, Katie. “Revisionist Cartography: The Politics of Place in Boland and Heaney.” In Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities, edited by Kathryn Kirkpatrick, pp. 190-203. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Conboy investigates the connection between poet and place in the work of Boland and Seamus Heaney.

                                                                                          … and when I take down the map of this island, it is never so I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve into a plane, but to tell myself again that 

the line which says woodland and cries hunger and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, and finds no horizon will not be there. 

—Boland, ITV 7-8

Eavan Boland's most recent volume of poems, In a Time of Violence (1994), and her collection of essays, Object Lessons: The Life...