New Collected 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.

John Redmond, The Guardian, Saturday 18th February 2006In the heaven of lost futuresJohn Redmond admires Eavan Boland's forlorn, regretful collection.Should a poem want to stop? In The End of the Poem, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben associates the conclusion of any poem with a crisis, a catastrophe, in which the poem fears its identity may be lost as it plunges down towards prose. Yet some poets enjoy the crisis so much that their poems end many times. Such a writer is Eavan Boland, for whom the full-stop might have been invented. Using unusually emphatic line-endings, her poems appear to relish cutting themselves. A Boland poem often begins with a one-word line which is also a one-word sentence: "Dusk." "Look." "August." "Ballyvaughan." Pursuing a staccato aesthetic draws some of the poems into self-parody but others, such as "This Moment" are pleasantly atmospheric: "A neighbourhood. / At dusk. // Things are getting ready / to happen / out of sight. //Stars and moths. / And rinds slanting around fruit."Few other poets, I think, would use a full-stop to separate the first two lines - or the last two lines. Typically, the poems creep forward cautiously, full-stop by full-stop, as though trying to hear the echo of their own footsteps. Such a style suits the forlorn, emptied-out environments one finds everywhere in this book: still, suburban houses that feel like stage-sets into which a character from Pinter or Beckett might walk - and doesn't.Living in the comfortable suburbs of south Dublin, Boland came to maturity as a writer in a period when poets from the republic were decisively dominated by their colleagues from Northern Ireland. Some of those northern poets, like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, she knew well from student days in 60s Dublin. Carving out a poetic identity at such a time was not easy. Before her emergence, Irish poetry, north and south, had been notoriously male. So it is quite understandable that much of the critical reception of Boland's work has focused on the difficulties she faced as a woman writer. In a lyric voice that was new to Irish poetry, she addressed the depression and loneliness of suburban womanhood:A childshifts in a cot.No matter what happens nowI'll never fill one again.As well as the subject-matter, the stiff, self-editing quality of her tone helped to convey an overwhelming sense of repression. But this tone was not there from the start. Boland's early work was blandly derivative: a blend of Yeats and Auden with bits of Longley and Mahon thrown in. The decisive break came in 1980 with the publication of the pamphlet In Her Own Image and the collection Night Feed. In these two publications, Boland's line drastically shortened, the full-stops multiplied, the subject-matter sharpened, and a new voice was adopted: that of Sylvia Plath. Indeed, In Her Own Image and Night Feed are so closely modelled on Plath's Ariel that they are practically imitations. Boland's "Menses" is a good example: "I am the moon's looking-glass. / My days are moon-dials. / She will never be done with me. / She needs me. / She is dry."Boland has not concealed her influences - her prose memoir, Object Lessons, admits them - but she has seemed more comfortable citing as an example another American poet, Adrienne Rich. This is despite noticeable differences of temperament. While both are feminists, Rich is an "activist" in a way that Boland is not. When Rich argues on behalf of "a lesbian continuum" (by which she means an intense, not necessarily sexual, sense of solidarity between women) she employs exactly the kind of daring language that Boland would never use. But Rich has been useful to Boland as a kind of ideological touchstone, supplying an explicit, intellectual framework to which she can point.To read Boland's work though the spectacles of gender, however, is not always helpful. Her best work occupies the narrow, negative terrain of emotional self-denial that no gender really owns. A sentiment we find in Mahon's "Leaves", for example, is very close to the heart of Boland's work: "Somewhere in the heaven / Of lost futures / The lives we might have lived / Have found their own fulfilment." Her poems regret, as Mahon's do, what might have been, but they do not articulate the might-have-been. To paraphrase Mahon, their conviction, that they could have been more than what they are, is what they are.Those wishing to investigate Boland's work might do better to start with the more manageable Outside History, which selects from the crucial period 1980-90. The over-inclusiveness of New Collected Poems, particularly of material predating 1980, dilutes the quality of the book. It is, we sense, "for the record" - and we're going to experience all of the record whether we like it or not.Given that much of the most promising poetry in Ireland today is being written by young women (Caitriona O'Reilly, Vona Groarke, Sinead Morrissey, to name a few), literary history may eventually see Boland's writing as a necessary stepping-stone. Something of this is suggested by Boland herself in "Is it Still the Same", one of the book's concluding poems. There she contemplates the position of a younger woman poet and wonders if, compared with her own day, conditions have changed. The poem ends with three lines which are self-regarding but fair:I wrote like that once.But this is different.This time, when she looks up,I will be there.

• Author's Notefrom 23 Poems,1962LiffeytownThe Liffey beyond IslandbridgeNew Territory,1967The PoetsThe GryphonsThe PilgrimNew TerritoryMiragesMigrationThe Dream of Lir's SonMaledictionLullabyBelfast vs DublinRequiem for a Personal FriendA Cynic at Kilmainham GaolFrom the Painting Back from Market by ChardinShakespeareThe Comic ShakespeareYeats in Civil WarThe Flight of the EarlsAfter the Irish of Egan O'RahillyThe King and the TroubadourAthene's SongThe Winning of Etainfrom 'Femininity and Freedom',1971'Deidre and Cathal in conversation'The War Horse,1975The Other WomanThe War HorseChild of Our TimeA Soldier's SonThe Famine RoadCyclist with Cut BranchesSongThe Botanic GardensPrisonersReady for FlightSistersThe Laws of LoveThe Family TreeNaoise at FourAnonFrom the Irish of Pangur BanElegy for a Youth Changed to a SwanO Fons BandusiaeDependence DayConversation with an Inspector of TaxesThe Atlantic OceanChorus of the ShadowsThe Greek ExperienceSuburban WomanOde to SuburbiaThe Hanging JudgeIn Her Own Image,1980Tirade for the Mimic MuseIn Her Own ImageIn His Own ImageAnorexicMastectomySolitaryMensesWitchingExhibitionistMaking UpNight Feed,1980Domestic InteriorNight FeedBefore SpringEnergiesHymnPartingsEndingsFruit on a Straight-Sided TrayLightsAfter a Childhood Away from IrelandMonotonyThe Muse MotherA Ballad of HomePatchwork or the Poet's CraftIn the GardenDegas's LaundressesWoman in KitchenWoman PosingIt's a Woman's WorldTirade for the Epic MuseThe New PastoralOn Renoir's The Grape Pickers'Daphne with her thighs in bark'The Woman Changes Her SkinThe Woman Turns Herself into a FishThe Woman in the Fur ShopThe Woman as Mummy's HeadA Ballad of Beauty and TimeThe Journey,1987II RememberMise EireSelf-Portrait on a Summer EveningThe Oral TraditionFeverThe Unlived LifeLaceThe Bottle GardenSuburban Woman: A DetailThe Briar RoseThe WomenNocturneThe Fire in Our NeighbourhoodOn HolidayGrowing UpThere and BackThe Wild SprayIIThe JourneyEnvoiIIIListen. This is the Noise of MythAn Irish Childhood in England:1951Fond MemoryCanaletto in the National Gallery of IrelandThe Emigrant IrishTirade for the Lyric MuseThe Woman takes her Revenge on the MoonThe Glass KingOutside History, 1990IObject LessonsThe Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave MeThe Rooms of Other Women PoetsObject LessonsOn the Gift of The Birds of America by John James AudubonThe GameThe Shadow DollThe RiverMountain TimeThe Latin LessonBright-Cut Irish SilverWe Were Neutral in the WarIIOutside History: A sequenceIThe Achill WomanIIA False SpringIIIThe Making of an Irish GoddessIVWhite Hawthorn in the West of IrelandVDaphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the GodVIThe Photograph on My Father's DeskVIIWe Are Human History. We Are Not Natural HistoryVIIIAn Old Steel EngravingIXIn ExileXWe Are Always Too LateXIWhat We LostXIIOutside HistoryIIIDistancesThe Nights of ChildhoodThe Carousel in the ParkContingenciesSpring at the Edge of the SonnetOur Origins Are in the SeaMidnight FlowersDoorstep KissesA Different LightHanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's RoomGhost StoriesWhat Love IntendedDistancesIn a Time of Violence,1994The SingersIWriting in a Time of Violence: A sequence1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited2 The Death of Reason3 March 1 1847. By the First Post4 In a Bad Light5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin6 Inscriptions7 Beautiful SpeechIILegendsThis MomentLoveThe PomegranateAt the Glass Factory in Cavan TownThe Water-ClockMothsA Sparrow Hawk in the SuburbsIn Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My OwnThe Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the CityThe ParcelLava CameoThe SourceLegendsIIIAnna LiffeyAnna LiffeyStoryTime and ViolenceThe Art of GriefA Woman Painted on a LeafThe Lost Land,1998IColony1 My Country in Darkness2 The Harbour3 Witness4 Daughters of Colony5 Imago6 The Scar7 City of Shadows8 Unheroic9 The Colonists10 A Dream of Colony11 A Habitable Grief12 The Mother TongueII The Lost LandHomeThe Lost LandMother IrelandThe BlossomDaughterCeres Looks at the MorningTree of LifeEscapeDublin, 1959Watching Old Movies When They Were NewHeroicHappinessThe Last DisciplineThe Proof that Plato Was WrongThe Necessity for IronyFormal FeelingWhose?Code,2001IMarriageIIn Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish CommissionIIAgainst Love PoetryIIIThe Pinhole CameraIVQuarantineVEmbersVIThenVIIFirst YearVIIIOnceIXThankëd be FortuneXA Marriage for the MillenniumXILines for a Thirtieth Wedding AnniversaryIICodeLimitsCodeMaking MoneyExile! Exile!Once in DublinHow We Made a New Art on Old GroundEmigrant LettersThe Burdens of a HistoryHorace Odes: II:XIEchoHide this Place from AngelsLimits 2How the Earth and All the Planets Were CreatedA Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long AgoIs It Still the SameSuburban Woman: Another DetailIrish PoetryIndex of First LinesIndex of Titles