Award winning poet and academic Evan Boland dies

Evan Boland, poet and academic, died on April 27.

Mary Robinson quoted from Evan Boland's poem The Singers in her inaugural presidential address in December 1990.

Evan Boland made women's experiences central to her poems

The Singers

The women who were singers in the West

lived on an unforgiving coast.

I want to ask was there ever one

moment when all of it relented--

when rain and ocean and their own

sense of home were revealed to them

as one and the same?

                                    After which

every day was still shaped by weather,

but every night their mouths filled with

Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars

and exhausted birds?

                                    And only when the danger

was plain in the music could you know

their true measure of rejoicing in

finding a voice where they found a vision.