Eavan Boland - Böcker

Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.

Written over years, the transcendent and moving poems in A Poet’s Dublin seek out shadows and impressions of a powerful, historic city, studying how it forms and alters language, memory, and selfhood. The poems range from an evocation of the neighborhoods under the hills where the poet lived and raised her children to the inner-city bombing of 1974, and include such signature poems as “The Pomegranate,” “The War Horse,” and “Anna Liffey.” Above all, these poems weave together the story of a self and a city—private, political, and bound by history. The poems are supported by photographs of the city at all times and in all seasons: from dawn on the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, to twilight up in the Dublin foothills.

"[Boland is] an original, dazzlingly gifted writer.... Uncompromising intellect, wry perception, and verbal brilliance.... A wonderfully elegant and sensual writer, keenly attuned to the pleasures of form and sound.... She's as musically gifted and as uncompromisingly intelligent as Seamus Heaney, and deserves comparable attention." —David Walker, Field

This, her seventh book, continues to mine what she has termed "the meeting place between womanhood and history."

Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.

Here, from one of our major poets, is the collected early work that has been long unavailable in this country. Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

In The Lost Land, Eavan Boland "is intensely engaged with the ancient bardic lineage of her homeland, giving her poems an ineluctable moral gravity. . . . Her poems offer a curative gift of merciful vision to a country blinded by its own blood and pain, as her narrators wait more or less patiently in their 'difficult knowledge' for the healing of their country's wounds" (San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle).

These powerful poems are written against the perfections and idealizations of traditional love poetry. The man and woman in these poems are husband and wife, custodians of ordinary, aging human love. They are not figures in a love poem. Time is their essential witness, and not their destroyer. A New York Times Notable Book and a Newsday Favorite Book of 2001.

These are poems about the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur. A marriage is a window for outward violence; a painted cup becomes a theater for a long love; in an ordinary room a mythic violation takes place.

These are poems about the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur. A marriage is a window for outward violence; a painted cup becomes a theater for a long love; in an ordinary room a mythic violation takes place.

This illuminating anthology follows the sonnet through its various moments and makers over five and a half centuries. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, two of our foremost poets, focus on vicissitudes, paying particular attention to how individual poets—from Shakespeare to Strand—have claimed these fourteen lines: lengthened them, shortened them, elaborated on them, and, in turn, been defined by them. Three sections—"The Sonnet in the Mirror," "The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths," and "The Sonnet extraordinary durability and its reinventions. The collection opens with personal introductions by the editors, and, in the appendix, they provide "Ten Questions for a Sonnet Workshop" to jump-start a conversation between students and teachers. With more than three hundred poems, The Making of a Sonnet guides readers through a vigorous adventures in craft and practice, right up to its extraordinary resurgence in contemporary poetry.

An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967–1987 confirmed Eavan Boland’s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.

Eavan Boland is considered “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” by Poetry Review. This stunning new collection, A Woman Without a Country, looks at how we construct one another and how nationhood and history can weave through, reflect, and define the life of an individual. Themes of mother, daughter, and generation echo throughout these extraordinary poems, as they examine how—even without country or settled identity—a legacy of love can endure.From “Talking to my Daughter Late at Night”We have a tray, a pot of tea, a scone.This is the hourWhen one thing pours itself into another:The gable of our house stored in shadow.A spring planet bending iceInto an absolute of light.Your childhood ended years ago. There isNo path back to it.

They are nine women with much in common--all German speaking, all poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation that was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each provides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on language, place, poetry, and womanhood. After Every War is a book of translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after World War II: Rose Auslander, Elisabeth Langgasser, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schuler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar Nick, and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish and, therefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest occasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as those of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the time--but with a difference. These poets see public events through the lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions, the bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost soul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which life is cruelly shattered.They reclaim these moments and draw the reader into them. The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical notes on the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her interest in the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed the heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country. Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to present their poems for what they are: documentaries of resilience--of language, of music, and of the human spirit--in the hardest of times.

Outside History was Eavan Boland's first collection of new poems since The Journey (1987). Here she explores private themes, but in ways which open out on the wider public sphere.Often the poems arise from the place in which womanhood and nationhood meet, a place that Irish history sometimes obscures, hence the title, Outside History.The 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' which the London Review of Books identified in her Selected Poems remains a source of power in this new work, heightened by her sensual and painterly lyricism. The domestic and the historical come together: a wealth of vivid 'obstinate details' evokes a larger emotional world. Eavan Boland is indeed 'a fine poet moving on to a new plateau of achievement' (LRB).

Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her "edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history" (J. D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother’s parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: "Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / … / Their hands are full of words." Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: "We will not leave you behind," a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020A Guardian Book of the Year 2020A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020An Irish Times Book of the Year 2020 A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century.Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her 'edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history' ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: 'Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / ... Their hands are full of words.' Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: 'We will not leave you behind', a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.

At her death in 2020, Eavan Boland left a formidable body of work – poems and prose. Together they transformed Irish poetry and had a considerable influence throughout the English-speaking world. She was also a major essayist, whose potent non-fiction work challenged and changed Irish culture and society. This collection of her most important essays combines autobiographical and critical reflections on the events and influences that shaped her life and work. It includes work never before collected, as well as draft chapters of the memoir Daughter that she was working on when she died.This wise, generous book, published on what would have been Eavan Boland's 80th birthday, tells the intertwined stories of her life and her writing, her work as a writer who was also a mother and a daughter, her sense of Ireland and exile, and her evolving insights into how the poet can earn, widen and share her freedoms. 'As time went on,' Jody Allen Randolph writes, 'Boland's prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet's work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critique by which they will eventually be judged.'

The poems in Eavan Boland’s new collection consider questions of inheritance and identity, of what is handed down and what is lost. Boland's poems are acts of preservation: they are aware of the significance of objects, memories, words, in keeping alive what we would otherwise 'lose / without thinking'. At the same time, they are a holding to account, addressing the damage wrought by that other inheritance, the 'art of empire', the 'business ... of colony'. In the title sequence, Boland seeks to restore voice and place to those who, like her grandmother, lived and died 'outside history', skilled in ... silence'.

New Selected Poems includes the key poems from Eavan Boland’s remarkable half century of writing. It began with 23 Poems in 1962 and it has continued through more than a dozen collections, each finding new dimensions in language, history and in the body subject to passion and to time. She is indeed, as Elaine Feinstein described her in Poetry Review, ‘one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century’. Her critical writing, her poetry and example have made an emancipating difference to writing in Ireland. She remarked in an interview in 2000, ‘women are now writing the Irish poem across a very big register of new tones, new subjects, new approaches […], I think I was one of the poets who became convinced of the need for change.’

Published to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this book brings together many of Boland's best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. Through juxtaposition of text and image, place and memory, the book creates a unique portrait of the city: 'fragments', Boland says, 'can point at something accurately'. A Poet's Dublin also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph and a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the central role it has played in their lives and in their work.

A Journey with Two Maps begins with an anecdote: one afternoon, Eavan Boland saw one of her mother's paintings for sale in a gallery, signed by her famous teacher. It is the starting point for an exploration of concepts of art and womanhood, of what it means to be a woman poet, finding her own voice within a tradition. Boland's discussion is both critical and deeply personal, an account of her development as a poet that traces her experiences as a woman, wife and mother in the light of influences such as Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath. Boland considers the ways in which influences themselves may be changed as a tradition is remade. In the final part of the book, 'Letter to a Young Woman Poet', she addresses an unseen poet of the future who will redraw the maps once more, remaking the past and the present.

Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001) and reproducing all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the development of a poet writing in a space she has cleared by critical engagement and experiment with form, theme and language.

'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.'In Object Lessons Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood, nationhood, and the relationship, for a writer, between the two. Deeply personal, focused on the places and times of her own lived experience, Object Lessons finds in the details of one writer's life the larger significances that link the individual to a community, culture, a history and a future. Boland explores what it means to move from being the object of a poem to being its author, what it means to claim a radically new space as a woman and a poet, while retaining a verifying sense of continuity and connection. The book becomes a portrait of a critical imagination making a new path, finding new meaning in the objects it encounters.

'The great unshackling of women's voices in poetry has one of its beginnings right here. These sad beautiful poems are full of rendings and breakings and burnings.' So writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to her selection of poems of Charlotte Mew (1868-1928). Identifying in Mew the startling, powerful voice that first made possible a new kind of poetry, free of Victorian expectations of a 'poetess', Boland has selected the poems that have meant most to her as a reader and a writer. The dialogue between the two poets establishes Mew's place in the continuing dialogue of women's writing.