New Collected Poems

by Eavan Boland

An expansive, celebratory collection from “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” ( Poetry Review ). 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.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature, Feminism

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

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, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), 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 was married to the novelist Kevin Casey.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry begins where language starts,’ wrote Irish poet Eavan Boland, ‘in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.’ And what a life she had. Publishing her first book of poetry while still a student, Eavan Boland would go on to become on of the biggest names in modern Irish literature with dozens of awards and over thirty books to her name when she passed in 2020 at the age of 75. New Collected Poems is an outstanding testament to the poet’s legacy, collecting her work from 23 Poems in 1962 through Against Love Poetry in 2001. Gorgeously threading ‘sex and history’ through her poems and making space to champion the lives and voices of women, their struggles, their erasure in the history and myths ‘written by men,’ as well as raising the everyday and ordinary to the level of legend, Boland poetic insight has a wide and wondrous berth of topics to travel upon her words. And it is words that interest her most. Born in Dublin in 1944, Boland moved to the UK at the age of six when her father became the Irish Ambassador to the UK and would grow up estranged from her homeland amidst anti-Irish sentiments and an education framed to delegitimize the Irish voices in history. Returning to the language of Ireland is a central theme and task for Boland to explore and transport the reader through, in keeping with the belief of Jacques Derrida that ‘exiles,’ as he wrote in Of Hospitality, ‘continue to recognize the language, which is called the mother tongue, as their ultimate homeland.’ An essential collection that shows Boland’s expertise in poetically demonstrating ‘there’s a way of life / that is its own witness,’ I have long loved New Collected Poems and consider it one of the more treasured books on my shelves.

In the end
It will not matter
That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
The body is a source. Nothing more.
There is a time for it. There is a certainty
About the way it seeks its own dissolution.
Consider rivers.
They are always en route to
Their own nothingness. From the first moment
They are going home. And so
When language cannot do it for us,
Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,
There are these phrases
Of the ocean
To console us.
Particular and unafraid of their completion.
In the end
Everything that burdened and distinguished me
Will be lost in this:
I was a voice.
—from Anna Liffey

I distinctly remember the moment I heard Eavan Boland passed. It was a warm day, April 27, 2020 and only a few weeks into the Covid pandemic that had us working from home. I read the news and immediately leashed my dog and went for a long, long walk in the spring sun thinking of poetry and history and how I came to Boland a few years prior when I was spending a lot of time in Dublin back and forth. I had picked up her collection A Poet's Dublin at the amazing bookstore Books Upstairs—Dublin’s oldest indie bookstore—and carried it with me through the streets, along the River Liffey (one of her best poems, the rather long Anna Liffey which you can read here comes from the character through which James Joyce personifies the river in Finnegans Wake), and around Trinity College where Boland attended and taught, even into the Long Room. Boland became an immediate favorite and I’ve long loved her work, the way she can craft a poem that is both a wide-angle look at history in the context of the women creating it while simultaneously embodying a close-up of the personal. She’s a poet I often think of on walks, and a poet I will always hold dear in my heart. Here’s my favorite:

Once

The lovers in an Irish story never had good fortune.
They fled the king’s anger. They lay on the forest floor.
They kissed at the edge of death.

Did you know our suburb was a forest?
Our roof was a home for thrushes.
Our front door was a wild shadow of spruce.

Our faces edged in mountain freshness,
we took our milk in where the wide apart
prints of the wild and never-seen
creatures were set who have long since died out.

I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky.
To listen for our own death in the distance.
Take my hand. Stand by the window.

I want to show you what is hidden in
this ordinary, ageing human love is
there still and will be until

an inland coast so densely wooded
not even the ocean fog could enter it
appears in front of us and the chilled-
to-the-bone light clears and shows us

Irish wolves. A silvery man and wife.
Yellow-eyed. Edged in dateless moonlight.
They are mated for life. They are legendary. They are safe.

Boland’s work ushers the reader through the dense foliage of Irish history and the strength of its people up against oppression. ‘ I’m an Irish poet. I always have been and always will be, ’ Boland said in a 2019 interview with The Georgia Review:

‘It’s not a transferable part of who I am. Nor is it alterable. So much of a poet’s formation has to do with rootedness, not just in a place but in a past. For good and ill, I’m constructed by that past, from the journey of those events and the struggle of that history. There’s no way of unwriting that and none of unliving it.’

Boland shapes her prose to the frame of history in a way that allows it to function like a mirror, like ‘the moon’s looking glass’ to show the world back to itself through her vision. That vision, more often than not, is one where women can be the focus. ‘ I began to write in an Ireland where the word “woman” and the word “poet” seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other,’ she has stated,, ‘I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.’ In the essay contained in her collection Domestic Violence, Boland addresses how the role of a poet should overturn the past to allow for new futures:

‘Can a single writer challenge a collective past? My answer is simple. Not only can, but should. Poetry should be scrubbed, abraded, cleared, and restated with the old wash stones of argument and resistance. It should happen every generation.’

A new future was forged from her work indeed. ‘I want a poem / I can grow old in,’ she writes in A Woman on a Painted Leaf, ‘I want a poem I can die in.’ While the loss of Boland at 75 is tragic, she at least passed in a literary reality where ‘In my generation, women went from being the objects of the Irish poem to being the authors of the Irish poem, and that was very disruptive in a literature that probably wasn’t prepared for that.’ Good for her, and good for all of us.

This is dawn.
Believe me
This is your season, little daughter.
The moment daisies open,
The hour mercurial rainwater
Makes a mirror for sparrows.
It's time we drowned our sorrows
—from Night Feed

‘I was a voice,’ Boland writes and to be a voice is to have power, to be heard. Boland often uses this voice to highlight the women in history, commemorating their works and arts and joining that great lineage ‘rejoicing in / finding a voice where they found a vision.’ Such as her poem Code to computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper:

‘I am writing at a screen as blue,
As any hill, as any lake, composing this
to show you how the world begins again:
One word at a time.
One woman to another.’

The male gaze hovers like a threat over many of Boland’s poems and we see her stanzas cascade like a force of nature despite it or how her lines coil to strike. Poems like Degas’s Laundress finds the speaker interceding between the lusts of an artist oogling the ‘roll-sleeved Aphrodites’ and protecting the laboring women. In her introduction to The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry, editor Peggy O'Brien observes that Bolan examines how ‘Irish women have been doubly colonized’:

‘First, with Irsh men, by numerous foreign invasions, and, second, exclusively as women, by nationalism, a male preserve. As an icon of the long-suffering nation, the Irish woman becomes “Mother Ireland,” a static and silent object distanced from her actual, decidedly unromantic self.’

This is rather notable in the incredible poem Anna Liffey where Boland tells ‘the truth of a suffered life’ through gorgeous lines like ‘love will heal / what language fails to know / and needs to say’ but also chronicles the role of women in the country. ‘The river took its name from the land / the land took its name from a woman’ and that we must ‘Make of a nation what you will / Make of the past / What you can.’ But just as importantly, she casts her poetic gaze over womanhood in a way that had previously been missing in poetry, particularly aging woman or mothers who were pushed out of the public gaze of history:

‘The body of an ageing woman
Is a memory
And to find a language for it
Is as hard
As weeping’

Motherhood makes its way into many of the poems and becomes a prevailing theme in her work. ‘I’ve often said that when I was young it was easier to have a political murder in a poem than a baby,’ she often quips in interviews:

‘ I always thought ordinary life was worth writing about, and that included my own…the subjects of the Irish poem back then were often landscapes or historical events or political memory. I was a woman in a house in the suburbs, married with two small children. It was a life lived by many women around me, but it was still not named in Irish poetry.’

To move her poem from the broad sweep of landscapes and politics to the politics of the household was a bold move for which Boland has been widely lauded and loved. And for the motherhood poetry, there are few more awe-inspiring than her poems about Persephone and Demeter, such as this opening half of The Pomegranate (read the full poem here):

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.
                   It is winter
          and the stars are hidden.

Figures of myth and legend frequently appear in Boland’s poetry, especially in the earlier half of her career. There are Irish figures like Lir, but also many of the Greek gods and goddesses populate her prose such as the poem The Making of an Irish Goddess where ‘Ceres went to hell / with no sense of time.’ Boland states ‘I need time - my flesh and that history - to make the same descent’ because ‘myth is the wound we leave / in the time we have.’ What a great stab of a statement there.

Irish Poetry

We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.
No music stored at the doors of hell.
No god to make it.
No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.
But I remember an evening when the sky
was dark at four.
When ice had seized every part of the city
and we sat talking--
the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.
And you began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon:
No Attic light for them and no Herodotus
but thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.
And the pitch-black Atlantic night.
And how the sound
of a bird's wing in a lost language sounded.
You made the noise for me.
Made it again.
Until I could see the flight of it: suddenly
the silvery, lithe rivers of your southwest
lay down in silence
and the savage acres no one could predict
were all at ease, soothed and quiet and
listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.

Most striking, however, is the way Boland gives the everyday objects profound significance and elevates the ordinary to the level of myth. Similar to the way her poetry seeks to give voice to the woman muffled by history, her poetry also elbows out room in myth for women and the everyday. ‘I began to feel a great tenderheartedness toward these things that were denied their visionary life,’ Boland said in an interview with PBS, ‘nobody thought a suburb could be a visionary place for a poet. Nobody thought a daily moment could be.’ In a way, she is creating her own legends and myths while rising the figure of the Irish woman as a figure of mythical power as a symbol of the Irish nation.

I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:
Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
—from The Lost Land

The Irish language is intricately intertwined with Irish culture, both as a symbol of heritage and identity but also resistance and pride. And so, too, does language become a crucial support beam through Boland’s examinations of life and history. In her prose work in Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, Boland writes on the importance of Irish language and how she left that loss as a child living in the UK:

‘Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of the country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places – it was not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct my present self.’

The loss of language is felt at a personal level, yet extends to a loss of history with Ireland eclipsed by the British. This appears most notably in her poem In Which the Ancient History I Learn is Not My Own as she finds ‘Ireland was far away. And farther away / every year.’ In Habitable Grief she writes of being ‘Irish in England’ and disconnected from her language: ‘this is what language is: a habitable grief’ she writes, ‘which hurts / just enough to be a scar. // And heals just enough to be a nation.’ To retain the language, to give voice to women in the language, to let the language thread the past and the present and rise like a monument to Ireland are all felt in the powerful prose of Eavan Boland.

I long to cry out the epic question
my dear companion:

Will we ever live so intensely again?
Will love come to us again and be
so formidable at rest it offered us ascension
even to look at him?

But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.
You walk away and I cannot follow.
—from Love

An essential collection from an essential poet and formidable voice for women in the arts, New Collected Poems is a marvelous overview of the poems of Eavan Boland. Her work helped reshape Irish poetry and through hers and the other women in her time ‘a woman in Ireland who wishes to inscribe her life in a poem has a better chance now to move freely around within that poem.’ Bringing the everyday and ordinary into the life of the mythic and giving space for women everywhere, Eavan Boland has left us a lasting legacy of gorgeous words that truly proves her own statement that ‘myth is the wound we leave / in the time we have.’

5/5

That the Science of Cartography is Limit

--and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragments of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lost Land

I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:

Where the hills
are the colours of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:

At night,
on the edge of sleep,

I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then

I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

[Hailey Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

the only irish writer ever if you ask me

[Elevate Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

Combining eleven of Eavan Boland’s books, New Collected Poems presents readers with her finest work. Boland, a contemporary Irish poet, guides readers across thirty years of her work in this 307 page tome. During the journey, one begins to traverse tradition, grasp snippets of myth, and peer inside the life of this extraordinary woman.

Most of Boland’s poems are written in traditional forms, which give her work a smooth consistency. The readers has a map of what to expect in terms of sound, but one is still surprised as one reads line by line. Boland has a keen ability to construct proper syntax while remaining consistent in sound. She employs this technique in all her poems, even the ones that break from tradition.

While many of her poems explore Irish politics and myth, Boland also focuses on issues of feminism. In “The Other Woman,” she describes the role of the abandoned wife. With eloquence she captures the heartache of infidelity with lines like: "I know you have a world I cannot share/Where a woman waits for you, beautiful/Young no doubt, protected in your care/From stiffening and wrinkling." In “It’s a Woman’s World” Boland speaks to all women of the sad fact that not much has changed for women over the course of history and ends the poem with “a burning plume/she’s no fire-eater/just my frosty neighbor/coming home,” which speaks to many women's contentment with their lot in life who live without a fire for something greater.

Boland holds mastery over her words and New Collected Poems is a travel through sound and thought.

Review by Michelle Tooker

[Alana Seymour · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always come to poetry eager to savor it—to read only one poem per day and really digest it. But it’s work, and so I get fatigued and then want to hurry to the end. In Boland’s case, though, I knew I had to fight the fatigue, and continue the process of taking it slowly, because these poems are so complex, and Boland has such a way with language, that it is worth contemplating each one. So, finally, half a year later, I’ve completed this collection, and remain in awe of Boland. Beautiful poetry.

[Doodle Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

The feminist scholar in me was drawn to poems dealing with female identity and status, which are critical of women's unequal treatment in society, art, and literature, but reveal the beauty, pleasure, and assuredness to be reaped from domesticity, cosmetics, and other realms typically occupied by women. I enjoyed the glorification of the 'unheroic' to use Boland's own expression. As a reader, I was drawn more broadly to the studies of objects and colour - I was sucked in, enchanted, and will look quite differently out of my window from here on out.

[One Sassy Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for my Masters. It’s hard to rate it, but I do think Eavan Boland was a very interesting, masterful and engaging poet. She broached all manner of subjects and wasn’t afraid of getting intimate and vulnerable. It’s all laid out in her poems. Some autobiographical, some not, the usual, however they’re all incredible. I particularly enjoyed the poems included from her collections: “In her own image”, “night feed”, “the journey” and “outside history”.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful contempory female Irish Poet. If you haven't read any of her work I highly recommend her new and collected poems which contain poems from her various other books. She is the type of poet that once you read her work, you want to tell the world about her.

[Lisa Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eavan Boland's poetry is spellbinding and honest with her exemplary gifts in lyrical and narrative forms. Each poem deserves multiple readings as additional interpretations reveal themselves like nesting dolls.

[Cora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful collection! Lovely language and lots to exploits in her poetry — Irish history and myth, and the woman’s and mother’s perspective, the classics.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where has Boland been all my life ?

[Jerry Wall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another reminder of my particular disfunction in knowing how to read and enjoy modern mostly unrhymed verse. I confess my tone deafness or meter insensitivity or my old fashionedness.

[in group pictures] unable even once to shed their gravity. p. 51
. . . summer is a place mislaid between expectation and memory. p. 220
. . . there is a way of making free with the past. p. 226
Maybe. Nearly. It could almost be. p. 229
In this time of fragrance and refrain,
whatever else might flower before the fruit,
and be renewed, I would not. Not again. p. 237
. . . whoever the muse is
or was of weeping, she has put the sound of it
beyond the reach of metric-makers, music makers. p. 239
He has not fires to recite his friendless measures by p. 245
I put my words between them
and the silence
the failing light has consigned them to
* * * other-whereness. p. 248
. . . the way to make pain a souvenir. p. 249
I saw our words had the rate power
to unmake history. p. 254
This is what language is"
a habitable grief. p. 255
It looks as if
someone once came here with a handful
of shadows, not seeds, and planted them. o. 258
Beautiful morning
look at me as a daughter would
look: with that lover and that curiosity -
as to what she came from.
And what she will become. p. 265
Where are the liv es we lived
when we were young. p. 283
a pool of rain
into which an Irish world has fallen. p. 294

[Cindy Brookshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poem is Boland's work, "The Winning of Etain," because it captures the emotions love evokes in so many forms. My other favorites are the domestic observations that become poetic play - how to wrap a package ("The Parcel"), imagining trees as relatives ("The Family Tree"), mulling tasks ("Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes"), overhearing another's conversation ("The Oral Tradition"), mundane talk with a neighbor ("The Unlived Life"), porch thoughts ("Time and Violence"), a new marriage ("VII First Year"), foreign language in the airport ("Emigrant Letters"), talking to a statue ("Heroic") and trotting out a muse as whore ("Tirade for the Mimic Muse"). I'm looking forward to reading about the poet herself next ("A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet").

[Stephen Rynkiewicz]

The Irish poet died in 2020, leaving her work as a coronavirus companion. Meditations on the Peep o' Day Boys and the Great Famine from In a Time of Violence are reminders of how we bind our wounds and compulsively pick at the scars.

[L.]

No clue how this escaped from my bookshelf. Snagged this so I’d have a copy of Boland’s poem “Anorexic,” which I first read in college. Greatly enjoy the witchiness of her 1980-1982 poems.

[Sb]

Fav poems were Anorexia and That the Science of Cartography is Limited <3

[Mael Brigde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking.

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boland has a unique poetic voice - her poems speak the stuff of Ireland, and make you love the places and things she writes about.

[YZ]

To me "In a Time of Violence" most successfully achieves the goals Boland sets for herself in "Object Lessons."

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't like all of it, but I loved a lot of it. A great book to keep on the nightstand- it was lovely company, having a few poems before bed.