New Selected Poems

by Eavan Boland

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.'

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2013

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

[Anna Snader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go ahead and read your Yeats and Heaney. I’m reading Eavan Boland. She beats them any day. But for real, this was a great collection! Although I’m used to Boland’s blunt feminist-charged poems, I loved seeing how her voice became more certain and direct over time. She is hands down the best Irish poet!

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

[David Cutler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was entirely unaware of Eavan Boland - which shows I am not at school in Ireland - and read this volume as a member of a book group. I loved them. accessible, quiet and powerful, often reflecting on motherhood, identity and nationality. I was a little less taken by poems with Classical allusions but I would recommend this volume extremely strongly.

[Iulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite Irish poet. Every word, line, poem - a treasure.

Some of my favourites:

“Outside History - A sequence”
“Nocturne”
“The Journey”
“Mother Ireland”

‘I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.’

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t connect with Boland’s work. I don’t know much about her personally, but it does say in her bio that she works between Dublin and Stanford, and many poems reference ‘coming back’ to Ireland from another country. (I presumed from context the other country was England.) There’s a tentativeness to the way she speaks about Ireland, Irish history, and topics of Irish concern, which I impute to be due to her uncertain connection to the country. The poems about colonialism - which were the ones I liked best - were yet closer to a plastic American version of a castle than the real, crumbling, dirty thing. It’s like she knows what she’s supposed to feel on this subject, but she doesn’t feel it. It’s intellectual, not emotional.

I also didn’t find her work effective at a word level, or stylish on a structural level. It’s all kind of … bland and metre-less in a way that doesn’t read as poetic. In prose it would also be dull, though, so I don’t have a solution.

Snippets I liked:

New Territory:

“And so Isaiah of the sacred text is eagle-eyed because
By peering down the unlit centuries
He glimpsed the holy boy.”

Listen. This is the noise of myth:

“The old romances make no bones about it.
The long and the short of it. The end and the beginning.
The glories and the ornaments are muted.
And when the story ends the song is over.”

Love:

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

Lava Cameo:

“Look at me, I want to say to her: show me
the obduracy of an art which can
arrest a profile in the flux of hell.”

Witness:

“What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open.
And the dead walk?”

Imago:

“Anti-art. A foul skill
traded by history
to show a colony

the way to make pain a souvenir.”

The Colonists:

“If I had I would have driven home
through an ordinary evening, knowing
that not one street name or sign or neighbourhood

could be trusted
to the safe-keeping
of the making and unmaking of a people.”

Domestic Violence:

“How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarrelled into the night,
their voices high, sharp:
nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.”

Amber:

“Reason says this:
The dead cannot see the living.
The living will never see the dead again.

The clear ear we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet”

Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet:

“ Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.”

​​Favourites: Anorexic; The Journey; This Moment; My Country in Darkness; Imago; Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet; Instructions; In Coming Days. (Note this is not a huge number, in terms of 'the whole poem came together for me'.)

[Peter McLaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boland is an Irish poetry ‘big name’, looming large in the Republic’s school curriculum for literature, and recently honoured by Trinity, who have renamed the former Berkeley library after her. Yet my impression (which I think is accurate) is that her prominence is much lesser in Northern Ireland; I’d never read her work before this year [2024]. There’s maybe an Edna Longley on Field Day–esque explanation of this, even though Boland’s cultural politics were as far from Longley’s as Field Day’s were. Works like ‘In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own’ make it clear that Boland was, til the end, reacting against the brief time she spent in London as a child, like an expat exaggerating their accent to keep it. The poems’ ‘dailiness’ (Boland’s word for the quality she aimed for in poetry) is thus less kath’ hēméran and more épioúsion, with the oúsía given by a particular vision of Irish culture that I can’t enter into—whether because I am a Northerner or because I am a ‘revisionist’.

[Monogo Daddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing

[Suzanne Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me 🤝 Irish poetry

[Elyse Welles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finishing this book is to mourn a friend. At the start of the final poem I realized that Boland is gone, sorted into the hall of the greats. I’ll never get to ask her why “the lilacs dripped blackly”, or what it’s like to walk home towards a “gorse-bright horizon”.

I bought this book in Dublin in March at the Museum of Literature. One exhibit had poetry being read over a speaker, and I heard a couple lines from ‘Quarantine’ (which has remained my favorite poem still): “but her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her. Let no love poem ever come to this threshold… what there is between a man and a woman. And in eunuch darkness can it best be proved.”

Eavan Boland had a rhythm all her

own. (<— get it? You’ll get it. She’s a master at enjambment.)

As a poet myself I really enjoyed noticing her meter and vocabulary choices. She had an exacting way of exploring Ireland, and what it’s like to be raised outside of your country. I could relate to that deeply.

Many of her lines will stick with me, but I’ll part with the one that makes me think most of what it is to lose an icon but to know she’ll live on in discourse and catharsis: “they gave their sorrows a name, and drowned it.”

[Michaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

...the old fable-makers searched hard for a word to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.

A subject people know this.
The first loss is through history.
The second one is through language.

To write about age you need to take something and break it.
(This is an art that has always loved young women. And silent ones.)

Eavan Boland...slaying it.

[Eiain · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really nice collection of poems. Poetry is not everyones taste of literature, but Eavan Bolands poetry was pleasant reading, and brings a new collection of Irish poetry to me to recommend to others.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was recommended Eavan Boland's poetry by a poet I respect, so I was disappointed not to enjoy this more. I could see that she was writing on interesting topics from unconventional angles, but none of it really spoke to me.