She was a professor at Stanford University , where she had taught from She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Boland's father, Frederick Boland , was a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly , was a noted painter. She was born in Dublin in When she was six, Boland's father was appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom ; the family followed him to London, where Boland had her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. At well over pages, this book represents something unusual - not a mere poetry anthology, of which there are plenty available already, but an exposition of the different genres of poetry, a study of various poetic forms and metres, their history and function and contemporary relevance, with appropriate examples past and present. Inevitably, it is quite strongly American-orientated in several areas, and some of the figures and reputations will be relatively unfamiliar to Irish readers; but this is also a gain, since it widens our appreciation of 20th-century verse.