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Life
b. Germany (a German national); issued poetry collections, Gonella (1985), illustrated by Jay Murphy; Litany for the Pig (1989); Spring in Henry Street (1996), Travels with Gandolpho (q.d.); The Latitude of Naples (2005); she is a member of Aosdána; has translated Irish poetry into German and vice-versa.; edited Writing in the West and Connaught Tribune (q.d.); issued Piano (2011); lives in Galway with husband and children.
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Works
Poetry, Gonella (Galway: Salmon Publ. 1985), 73pp., ill. Jay Murphy; Litany for the Pig (Galway: Salmon Publ. 1989), 77pp., ill. by Jay Murphy; Spring in Henry Street (Dublin: Dedalus Press 1996), 87pp.; Travels with Gandolpho (Dublin: Dedalus Press 2000), 90pp.; The Latitude of Naples (Dublin: Dedalus Press 2005), 96pp.; Eva Bourke, Piano (Dublin: Dedalus Press 2011), 120pp.
Miscellaneous, ed. Writing in the West and Connaught Tribune (q.d.); ed., with Borbála Faragó, Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dublin: Dedalus 2010), 268pp.
Contrib. ‘Sonata of the Painter’s Shadow’, & Interview to Brian Bourke: Five Decades 1960s-2000s, ed. Charlie McBride; foreword by Patrick T. Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2010), 319pp. [other contribs. incl. Seamus Heaney [Bourke's Mark]; James McKenna, Desmond Egan [Landscape with Figure], and Frank McGuinness [The Baker Takes a Walk]
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Criticism
Interview in Rebecca E. Wilson, and Gillian Somerville-Arjat, [interviews and] eds., Sleeping with Monsters: conversations with Scottish and Irish women poets (Wolfhound 1990), pp.70-78 [incl. poems, “The Fish”, and “Two Times in Domestic Interior”]; Megan Buckley, ‘Experiential Ekphrasis in Eva Bourke’s “Letter to Sujata”, in Essays In Irish Literary Criticism: Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality, ed. Deirdre Quinn & Sharon Tighe-Mooney (Mellen Press 2009), q.pp..
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Commentary
Fiona Sampson, review of The Latitude of Naples [inter al.], in The Irish Times (11 June 2005), Weekend, p.11: ‘[T]his collection gives us a northern hemisphere inhabited – one could almost say domesticated - by the narrator’s experience. Bourke is a poet who belongs to more than one country; and her new book at times reads like a family album, with its letter to “my dearest daughter in the skies” (“Breaths and Visions”) and its reminiscences of Vietnam-era Boston, of trips to the Midi, to Mannin Bay and to contemporary New York. / Keep reading, though, and a deeper intimacy becomes apparent. It’s the intimacy of the sickroom, in which a nursing nun is astonished by “a convention of shoes / living their strange double lives / wherever she looks” (“Shoes”); in which we long for the “Sequel” which will be possible if “Doctor P’s prognosis will be optimistic”; in which it’s only when the poet lays out her mother that “For the first time I did / for her what without question / she had often done for me”. / This is the intimacy of elegy, a deeper grief which underscores the European experience; to which the lucid snapshots of “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen” bear witness: “The almond tree is the most beautiful tree. / I saw one once in a garden in today. / I am six years old / I like to sing / and eat raisins and Almonds.” / Side, by side with this, though, are poems that celebrate the imagined glamour of “the old silk road / to Samarkand (“The Latitude of Naples”); a world of spices; the pleasures of painting and writing. This is a mature and, generously proportioned collection, in which Bourke the poet successfully translates the European experience for an anglophone readership.’
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References
Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares, and Brendan Kennelly, eds., Ireland’s Women (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994).
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