"It is a miraculous task that Eavan Boland set for herself in The Historians: nothing less than the redefining of both history and poetry as ongoing individual consciousness transforming into artistic process. In the book’s first poem, 'The Fire Gilder,' this process occurs before the reader’s eyes, posited as an artist mother’s love of silver and gold, 'one was volatile, one was not.' In exact phenomenal mimicry, Boland demonstrates how memory is separated from knowledge (one volatile, the other not). Each poem is a revelation of a past made new and a present equal in the accuracy of eloquent regard. This book is alive as a legacy for all readers—and for the future where Eavan Boland’s greatness will endure."

Carol Muske-Dukes

"Eavan Boland could never tolerate the silences and erasures of official history. She knew too well who was left out. She wrote to fill the gaps, to memorialize people on the margins, particularly on the margins of empire. She used her own experience to feel her way into the lives of other women, especially Irish women, and brought their experience out of the shadows. In her splendid last book, The Historians, she recalls how she started to write 'burning light, / building heat until all at once / I was the fire gilder / ready to lay radiance down.' I cannot yet accept Eavan Boland’s untimely death, but I’m grateful for the way that all her life she laid that radiance down, and then raised it up."

Edward Hirsch