Updated / Wednesday, 21 Apr 2021 16:50 Colm Tóibín introduces Boland: Journey of a Poet, a new online production from Druid Theatre exploring the life of poet Eavan Boland through her own poetry and autobiographical prose, edited by Tóibín and performed by actor Siobhán Cullen, and premiering online this Thursday, April 22nd. I knew Eavan Boland's voice from the radio. Her tone was both questioning and authoritative. Poetry mattered to her. It did not survive solely in a private realm, but had, she believed, an element that was public. Its responsibility lay in the large, uncharted space between the lyrical and the political. As a reviewer and a broadcaster, she sought to tease out how this fraught and shifting space could be transformed. As a poet, she set about interrogating what was private, making clear that any image in a poem reflects not only the self but the wider world. And the question of who speaks in a poem, or who is the subject of a poem, remains a political one.