New Selected Poems

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College in Maine, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Historians (2020), which won the Costa Poetry Award 2020 and was a 2020 Book of the Year in the TLS, Guardian, Sunday Independent and Irish Times, The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1982), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). Her poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She divided her time between California and Dublin where she lived with her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey. Eavan died in Dublin on 27th April 2020.

'She has the equipment of the true poet, that is to say an imagemaking faculty, a true devoted eye and an ear for rhythm.' --Iain Crichton Smith 'Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century.' --Elaine Feinstein 'Some of [Boland's] poems have become part of the common currency of our country and time. They begin as words and end as emblems.' --Irish Times 'Over all her collections, her developing forms and subjects - the fabric of domestic life, myth, love, history and Irish rural landscape - have kept their commitment to lyrical grace and feminism.' --Ruth Padel

• Author’s Notefrom New Territory 1967Athene’s SongNew TerritoryFrom the Painting Back from Market by ChardinYeats in Civil WarBelfast vs Dublinfrom The War Horse 1975The War Horse The Famine Road Child of Our Time Suburban Woman The Laws of Love O Fons Bandusiae Cyclist with Cut Branches Song from In Her Own Image 1980Anorexic In Her Own Image Making Up Tirade for the Mimic Muse from Night Feed 1982Night Feed Domestic Interior Energies Monotony Endings After a Childhood Away from Ireland The Muse Mother Woman in Kitchen Patchwork or the Poet’s Craft Degas’s Laundresses It’s a Woman’s World The New Pastoral ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark’ The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish from The Journey 1987ISelf-Portrait on a Summer Evening Mise Eire The Oral Tradition Fever Lace I Remember The Bottle Garden Suburban Woman: A Detail The Briar Rose The Women Nocturne IIThe Journey Envoi IIIListen. This is the Noise of Myth An Irish Childhood in England: 1951 Fond Memory The Emigrant Irish The Glass Kingfrom Outside History 1990I Object LessonsThe Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me The Rooms of Other Women Poets The Shadow Doll The Latin Lesson Bright-Cut Irish Silver II Outside History: A sequenceI The Achill Woman II A False Spring III The Making of an Irish Goddess IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the GodVI The Photograph on My Father’s Desk VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural HistoryVIII An Old Steel Engraving IX In ExileX We Are Always Too Late XI What We Lost XII Outside History III DistancesDistances Midnight Flowers Our Origins Are in the Sea What Love Intended from In a Time of Violence 1994The Singers I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited 2 The Death of Reason 3 March 1 1847. By the First Post 4 In a Bad Light 5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin 6 Inscriptions 7 Beautiful Speech II LegendsThis Moment Love The Pomegranate Moths In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own The Parcel Lava Cameo Legends III Anna LiffeyAnna Liffey Time and Violence A Woman Painted on a Leaf from The Lost Land 1998I Colony: A Sequence1 My Country in Darkness 2 The Harbour 3 Witness 4 Daughters of Colony 5 Imago 6 The Scar 7 City of Shadows 8 Unheroic 9 The Colonists 10 A Dream of Colony 11 A Habitable Grief 12 The Mother Tongue II The Lost LandThe Lost Land Mother Ireland The Blossom Tree of Life The Necessity for Irony Heroic Whose? from Code 2001I MarriageI In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish CommissionII Against Love Poetry III The Pinhole Camera IV Quarantine V Embers VI Then VII First Year VIII Once IX Thankëd be Fortune X A Marriage for the Millennium XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary II CodeCode Limits Limits 2 How We Made a New Art on Old Ground Making Money Exile! Exile! Is It Still the Same Irish Poetry from Domestic Violence 2007Domestic Violence1 Domestic Violence 2 How the Dance Came to the City 3 How It Was Once In Our Country 4 Still Life 5 Silenced 6 Histories 7 Wisdom 8 Irish Interior 9 In Our Own Country Letters to the DeadAn Elegy for my Mother In Which She Scarcely AppearsAmber And Soul On This Earth Letters to the Dead To Memory Becoming the Hand of John SpeedAtlantis – A Lost SonnetBecoming the Hand of John Speed Violence Against Women Instructions In Coming Days New PoemsArt of Empire The Long Evenings of their Leavetakings Re-reading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in a Changed IrelandAs Becoming Anne BradstreetCityscape A Woman Without a Country Index of First LinesIndex of Titles