Former President Mary Robinson shared personal memories of her lifelong friend Eavan Boland at a moving ceremony yesterday to honor the poet with the Irish PEN / PEN after her award for outstanding contribution to Irish literature.
RS Robinson told the audience the two met in the mid-60s as students at Trinity College.
Over the years, the women kept in touch through long conversations, and she remembered how she spent the night before her wedding to Eavan.
When the former president asked for a needle and thread to repair slight ruffles on the hem of her wedding dress, Eavan laughed and said there were times she could not find Kevin, her husband, what more to say. ‘ a needle. “We ended up with a pin, which did the thing,” Mrs. Robinson recalls.
Later, when she became president, their friendship deepened. “When you are president, there are very few places where you can let your hair down, knowing that you are in a safe place. “So often the presidential car drove out to Dundrum (to Eavan’s house) and Kevin knew how to leave us alone,” said Mrs Robinson.
“We found a lot in common, because she tried to find her way in poetry and I tried to find my way in law. We just became very close friends. “
Their friendship was further strengthened when Mrs Robinson became godmother to Sarah Casey, Eavan’s daughter, and her husband Kevin Casey became godfather to Mrs Robinson’s daughter Tessa.
The coveted award was posthumously presented to Eavan and accepted by her daughters Sarah and Eavan at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MOLI) in Dublin.
It was to be offered in March 2020, but Covid-19 intervened, followed by Eavan’s untimely death the following month, aged 75.
“She had an incredible journey as a poet,” Eavan Casey said. “She bravely carved out her own poetic identity and removed so many obstacles that women writers faced. She was an absolute pioneer and pioneer.
“In her poetry, she was revolutionary, writing about her home life and insisting that feeding a baby, leaving milk bottles on the doorstep and living in the suburbs could be the thing of poetry.”
Among those who paid tribute were co-poets Paula Meehan and John O “Donnell, and writer and former minister Liz O’Donnell.
Eavan, a feminist as well as a poet and lecturer, said later in life: “I started writing in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed in a kind of magnetic opposition. “
She published her first volume as a student. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the Bucknell Medal of Distinction.