Faye Boland's first collection Peripheral examines the experience of the Irish Diaspora (she herself was an Irish emigrant) as well as the 'otherness' of displacement in Irish society.
Of Peripheral poet Eileen Sheehan says: "Boland's poems chart a restless search for home, for purpose. A judicious collection in an era when people feel increasingly disconnected from their own sense of worth."
The tension between otherness and belonging is resolved in her mediative nature poetry in which she metamorphizes into the Irish landscape, willingly surrendering to its serenity. She celebrates the beauty of Irish flora and fauna, rugged landscape and seascapes, the natural wilderness of the Earth that defies human attempts to order and control. At this juncture her writing moves from the physical to the ethereal.
Her work questions our disconnectedness with each other and with the Earth's gifts, but offers us the possibility of redemption through reflection and preservation of the abundance that is ours if we can just slow down and savour it, perhaps adjusting our values along the way.
Her work has been published in various journals and magazines. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Poetry on the Lake XIII International Poetry Competition and, in 2017, she has won the Hanna Greally International Literary Award alongside the Robert Leslie Boland poetry prize 2018.