Amber
Illustrations by Miki Lowe
Eavan Boland is known as a poet of history, but she might’ve taken issue with that label. As she told The Believer in 2014, she was interested not in history but in the past. Boland—who died in 2020 at age 75—saw the former as the official narrative, telling the kind of stories that showed up not only in school textbooks in her native Ireland but also in the poetry of her contemporaries. These writings didn’t seem to reflect the private lives of ordinary people.