"Her very public brilliance may have worked against her over the years, for the Irish poetry world—and it is a strange old world of fortune-tellers and horse thieves—is suspicious of brilliance. It loves drunkenness, for example, or a visible impoverishment, but it hates the poet who seems to be in control all the time; especially if that self-control is attended by privileged social origins or ecstatically successful academic careers." Thomas McCarthy on Eavan Boland • Irish Examiner

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