Against Love Poetry: Poems

by Eavan Boland

A collection of poems about marriage by one of our most celebrated poets. 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.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature, Ireland, 21st Century, Fiction

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

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

[Martina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, elegiac and beautiful! My favorites are „The Old City“ and „ Marriage for the Millennium „.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorites:

“Against Love Poetry”
“Quarantine”
“Once”
“Code”

Look them up. You won’t regret it.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boland uses the first half of this collection to set out her thoughts on the nature of love, and the remaining poems display her mastery of diverse topics. She uses her Irish identity to good effect, as also her experience of migration, and it is always clear that the poet is a woman with things to say from that perspective; the collection as a whole has the air of a mature reflection over a life lived fully. Her poems are serious and often profound, her ideas are original and quite inspirational, her imagery is kaleidoscopic and she can tell fantastic stories in the most simple terms. She has a very accessible style: nothing is dry and many poems are light hearted. Most of all, her poetry is gobsmackingly effective. I am so delighted that I stumbled upon this beautiful collection.

[raluca · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
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.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
(Quarantine)

[meggggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked bits and pieces, but i need to process the thematic threads. i like woman w/o a country better

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2001 and therefore stuck in my To Read pile for over a decade. Shame on me: it’s a fate the poems didn’t deserve. Against Love Poetry is a mere slip of a collection, divided into two sections, “Marriage” and “Code.” The first section is a single, eleven poem sequence. The second section holds sixteen individual poems thematically linked not just to each other but to “Marriage” as well.

So, the title. Ms. Boland is against the feverish strand of romantic poetry that is all roman candle passion, that ignores the deep measure of love that history takes on a relationship. Similarly, she rejects the notion that some lives, as in most lives, are not fit subjects for poetry, lacking the integrity, reality, life that we seem to deny to mainstream lives—too conventional, too risk free, too boring. The code word for that is variations of suburban. But let’s stick to love and marriage.

The first poem sets the tone: “Hester Bateman made a marriage spoon / And then subjected it to violence. / Chased, beat it. Scarred it and marked it. / All in the spirit of our darkest century.” Bateman is an 18th century English silversmith who made the spoon for an Irish couple. Later it states: “Art and marriage: now a made match.” The poem concludes: “History frowns on them: yet in its gaze / They join their injured hands and make their vows.” This sets up the second poem, the collection’s title poem, which concludes, “It is to mark the contradictions of a daily love that I have written this. Against love poetry.”

What follows is a mix of portraits that shine under the frowning face of history—personal, national and cultural—that nonetheless provides testimony to love and love’s commitment. Here is one randomly chosen from the book’s second section called “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 underworld-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:
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 the 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.

[Gharonk · Rating 4 out of 5]

eavan boland - the genuine irish poet with the irish style of writing. we can found her irish mark-ups in several poems. she more than adequate to impress me in the first sentences. shamrock, the durrow, all are in compact shape unfinish us in final world. i thirsty of her words in the end of her poet.

absolutely enigmatic

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it just to read "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."

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Code" is a standout for me. enjoyable, but hard to imagine myself coming back to these poems.

[Christopher Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect combination of what can be done with words and what can be said with words while seeming effortless and capturing the ordinary.

[Dr. Sionainn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forgive me, Ms. Boland, but I like your other collections better 😭 😭 😭

However, she wrote some of my favorite poetic lines I've ever read:

"He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under the freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her."

[Dolors · Rating 4 out of 5]

I entered Boland's poetry the way "an echo enters a sound."
A brief but splendid collection of poems that weave together the personal, the historical and the author's reflections on love, capturing the complexities and imperfections of marriage.

"we woke early and lay together
listening to our child crying, as if to birdsong"

Oh, the shared experience, the quiet, tender moments that define a relationship; the memories that define a life. How unusual, to be seen so clearly, to be remembered like that. Where have the lives we lived gone?
Boland's poetry is all raw honesty, a beautiful metaphor for the rich, colorful, and sometimes terrifying tapestry of life.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, especially II. Against Love Poetry: "I have loved you deeply from that moment to this. I have loved other things as well. Among them the idea of women's freedom. Why do I put these words side by side? Because I am a woman. Because marriage is not freedom."

Wow. A sharp knife, straight into me. These contradictions and how we live between them and around them.

[Kelly Grace Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boland is a master at sparse language and deep emotion.

[Cindy Brookshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying introduction to this poet. Looking forward to reading her collected poems and "Journey" memoir.

[riv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Against: Love Poetry. Against Love: Poetry. Against Love Poetry.

[annabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

a collection of very beautifully written poems!! "how we made a new art on old ground" & "emigrant letters" were two of my favorites

[courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love that this collection of poems about love and the transformations of love -- the surface and texture of it -- is entitled "Against Love Poetry" because it is. the collection stands against the thousands of poems about love and its evanescence, its fragility, and its fickleness. boland writes about the dangers of love and the risks of love, but more about the shifting, swaying, unlocatable, let alone undefinable center of love. it transforms and transforms. and boland shows us the passage of time and the transformations of life and love in small and powerful ways. a spoon, a plate, a desk, the color of her hair. beautiful. i read this woman's writing and i need to hug someone.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boland's poetry is always lovely, and this book is particularly rooted in "place." My favorite from this book is "Code," which says it is "An Ode to Grace Murray Hopper 1906-88 maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL." I love the comparison between writing poetry and writing computer code, how both are creating a world.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this collection! "Quarantine" is a heartbreakingly beautiful poem and should be read by everyone.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, beautiful look at love, in all sorts of terms. Perhaps the most poignant poem in this book is "Quarantine." Gorgeous work.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

senior thesis

[Padraic · Rating 5 out of 5]

To my mind, Ireland's (well, California's) premier poet. That includes Seamus.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems about her marriage are particularly powerful.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read SQT's copy

[Mei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because I read her poems in this book, Eavan Boland has become my favourite poet.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update: 5 Stars. Reread this collection and appreciated it even more.