About John

John Boland is Dublin-born and has worked in journalism all his adult life. He was a theatre and film critic with the Irish Press, literary columnist for the Irish Times and is currently television critic and books critic for the Irish Independent.

He also contributes regularly to RTE’s Sunday Miscellany on literary, musical and arts topics and has won an Arts Journalist of the Year award. His first book of poems, Brow Head, was published in 1999.

Academic and critic; Irish Times ‘Book Worm’ columnist to 1997; named Arts Journalist of 1998; author of Brow Head (Newry: Abbey 1999), 60pp., issued with cover-note by Seamus Heaney.

Brow Head by John Boland

John Boland’s poems are both melancholgy and vital, says Frank Ormsby. Celebrant and elegist, Boland writes movingly, with passionate restraint, of the joys and insecurities that give tension to our lives. And Thomas Kilroy wrote about this collection: These fine poems speak to us with direct lucidity and moral energy about the frail connections of human relationships. The book creates a highly literate, personal, inner world.