In an Irish context it may not be possible to imagine poetry in relation to the 'body' of the 'nation' without evoking the still-existent border to which Medbh McGuckian starkly alludes, a political and historical fact that divides 'Ireland' into two states and at least two bodies politic. Neither is it possible, despite the growing popularity of these three women poets, to imagine the term 'Irish poet' without picturing the foregrounded and masculine body emerging from the landscape which Eilean Ni Chuilleanain challenges. Bringing together both implications, the phrase 'body of the nation' implicitly recalls the nationalist literary text to which Eavan Boland, probably Ireland's most influential feminist, alludes in her essay 'Subject Matters', The Spirit of the Nation. Concerning these 'sixpenny booklet' anthologies of nationalist ballads compiled by The Nation newspaper from 1843, Boland writes: 'in its pages the public poem and the political poem were confused at the very moment when the national tradition was making a claim on Irish poetry which would colour its themes and purposes for a century'.