An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967­-1987

by Eavan Boland

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.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature, Ireland

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

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

[Mir]

Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet


How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. 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.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck me up Eavan

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

yass queen

[Crystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

The litheness of Bolen’s skills as a poet is traced through this collection covering 20 years of her work. She flexes from strict poetic form to freedom with line and meter and her subject matter blazes a wide swath from Ireland’s national history to women’s struggles to deep, yet non-esoteric introspection. The reader,seeing her collections together, can trace the phases of Boland’s life: childhood, womanhood, motherhood and maturity. These poems are interspersed with deftly written poetic retelling of histories and legends. Among my favorites here is New Territory, Ode to Suburbia, The Flight of the Earls, The Pilgrim, Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist, From the Irish of Pangur Ban, A Ballad of Beauty and Time, Patchwork, Domestic Interior, The Oral Tradition, Fever, Lace, The Women, Growing Up, and Listen: This is the Noise of Myth. This book is a lovely quilting of words as only a woman can create.

[Amiee F-C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read her poem Anna Liffey in anthology of Irish poets and went out and got this book. Anna Liffey is an incredible poem and she has other really great poems as well, a lot dealing with women's issues (motherhood, sexuality, roles, violence, sex work), some that draw on literary tradition, Irish experiences (especially that of an "exile" and the childhood of the poet in England), and Greek myth even. She's a brilliant woman who is both academic and personal - I love women who can write that way. Yay duality.

[Padraic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had just read An Origin Like Water, and found myself sitting across from Ms. Boland in a hotel lobby in Houston. It was all I could do to stop myself from falling to my knees. She wields words like a pitcher throws a change-up. All you can do is shake your head and wonder how _that_ happened...

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a treat reading Boland's early work, and seeing her growth over the poems in this collection. Such stunning turns of phrase, haunting repetitions. She is good at rendering the despairs and beauties of domesticity and suburbia, of myth and folklore, with wit, grit, and warmth.

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly visual and deeply felt, the poems in this collection display her remarkable range of subjects, styles, moods, always with her unparalleled imagery, as in the last stanza of "The Wild Spray" ("watching the streetlamp making rain into a planet of tears"):

The Wild Spray

It came to me one afternoon in summer—
a gift of long-stemmed flowers in a wet
contemporary sheath of newspapers
which pieced off easily at the sink.

I put them in an ironstone jug
near the window; now years later
I know the names for the flowers
they were but not the shape they made:

The true rose beside the mountain rose,
the muslin finery of asparagus fern,
rosemary, forsythia; something about it was
confined and free in the days that followed

which were the brute, final days of summer—
a consistency of milk about the heat haze,
midges freighting the clear space between
the privet and the hedge, the nights chilling

quickly into stars, the morning breaking late
and on the low table the wild spray
lasted for days, a sweet persuasion,
a random guess becoming a definition

I have remembered it in a certain way—
displaced yellows and the fluencies
of colours in a jug making a statement of
the unfurnished grace of white surfaces

the way I remember us when we first came here
and had no curtains and the lights on
the mountain were sharp, distant promises
like crocuses through the snowfall of darkness

and we stood together at an upstairs window
enchanted at the patterns in the haphazard,
watching the streetlamp making rain into
a planet of tears near the whitebeam trees.

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A group of good poems.
I first heard of Eavan Boland in graduate school. I thought I knew what good Irish poetry was (Yeats, Heaney, Kavanagh ). I was wrong and I am not afraid to admit it. This collection of her poetry is a group of good poems. What Boland does well is make the mythology that is present in a lot of Irish poetry accessible. Boland also adds perspective to the literary tradition of Irish verse. Her best of poetry in the collection feels more like a conversation between herself and the reader. I will read more Boland works. This collection is a good start for those who are wanting to read, comprehend, and appreciate the value of contemporary Irish poetry.

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first encounter with Eavan Boland. I was ignorant of her work until I read Martin Doyle's "Eavan Boland, leading Irish poet and champion of the female voice, dies aged 75" in 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙄𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙨 from 27 April 2020 that someone had posted on Facebook.
I found some of the poems in this collection very good. Others I did not fathom. Among those I liked are "A Cynic at Kilmainham Jail," "Conversations with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry," "Suburban Woman," "Witching," "Daphne with her Thighs in Bark,""The Women," "Envoi," and "The Emigrant Irish."
Give it a read and find your favorites.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review pending.

[Charles M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing . The early poems are lifeless and sometimes incomprehensible. The poems from the Eighties are a leap forward. None equal some of her later poems like Quarantine

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

2011 notes: An exploration of the domesticity of women through objects, functions, and relationships in the past century. A quality of reverence as if painting a series of still lifes.

[CAG_1337 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boland is clever and erudite, and those dimensions are well-represented here, but the works in this collection seldom achieved anything I would consider poetic in terms of their emotional impact. These are traditional, formal, and overly concerned with rhyme and structure--the earlier works in particular; the later works are largely free of that.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems were amazing. Most were at the very least good. However it pales in comparison to the genius that is "Against Love Poetry".

[Sara Lamers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good intro. to Boland's work.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

senior thesis