SOURCE: Raschke, Debrah. “Eavan Boland's Outside History and In a Time of Violence: Rescuing Women, the Concrete, and Other Things Physical from the Dung Heap.” Colby Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 1996): 135-42.

In the following essay, Raschke asserts that “Boland's Outside History and In a Time of Violence use the concrete, physical world to revise notions of what sustains, to query historiography, and to expose the dangers of mythology.”

Eavan Boland's poetry has been described as “impeccably scornful,” as “denunciatory,” as too “strident” and too “vehement” (Henigan 110), and as justification for “her dangerous attachment to bringing up babies” (Reizbaum 472). She has been accused of unduly elevating the domestic, of mythologizing the suburbs, and of betraying an Irish literary tradition, which, in emphasizing Gaelic roots, relies heavily on mythical images.¹ Such claims relegate Boland to a preoccupation with trivia, to plebeian tastes. Yet Boland's two latest works, Outside History and In...