Collected Poems

by Eavan Boland

The enormous talent of celebrated Irish Padraic Fallon is demonstrated in this volume, which includes early poems (1930-1945), poems of maturity (1946-1959), late poems (1960-1974), and poems from plays, translations, and versions of Homeric Hymns and Ballads.

Genres: Poetry

336 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

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

[Maddie Worton · Rating 3 out of 5]

My fav is 'what we lost'.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jessa lent me this book years and years ago. I picked it up this summer as I suspected it might be on the short list of books she would want to take with her to Germany -- she's mentioned Boland a few times as an author whose work it is difficult to find in the United States.

Anyway, I enjoyed this poetry well enough, Boland is clearly a very accomplished writer. However, I felt that I was really missing most of it. Much of Boland's earlier poems were based heavily on mythology and traditional stories that were largely unfamiliar to me. (Darn my lack of a classical education!) Then later poems were informed by the history of Irish-English conflicts, which really I just know nothing about at all.

There were quite a number of poems more generally on womanhood, motherhood and relationships. Those, of course, I could relate to, and were lovely, some biting, and all very intelligent and skillful. But it's easy to see why Jessa, with her interest in mythology and Irish history, would get a lot more out of this collection than me.

[Jocelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course I think this book of poetry is worth reading. . . I only spent hundreds of hours writing a thesis about this author and Seamus Heaney.