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A Woman Without a Country: Poems
A powerful work that examines how―even without country or settled identity―a legacy of love can endure. Eavan Boland is considered “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” by Poetry Review . This stunning new collection, A Woman Without a Country , looks at how we construct one another and how nationhood and history can weave through, reflect, and define the life of an individual. Themes of mother, daughter, and generation echo throughout these extraordinary poems, as they examine how―even without country or settled identity―a legacy of love can endure. From “Talking to my Daughter Late at Night”
We have a tray, a pot of tea, a scone.
This is the hour
When one thing pours itself into another:
The gable of our house stored in shadow.
A spring planet bending ice
Into an absolute of light.
Your childhood ended years ago. There is
No path back to it.
We have a tray, a pot of tea, a scone.
This is the hour
When one thing pours itself into another:
The gable of our house stored in shadow.
A spring planet bending ice
Into an absolute of light.
Your childhood ended years ago. There is
No path back to it.
96 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2014
18 people are currently reading
450 people want to read
About the author
Eavan Boland
84 books162 followersBorn 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
June 17, 2014
An absolutely gorgeous book of poetry. The prose is incredibly visual, the tone is very poignant and filled with a sense of longing for things or days gone by. My favorites were: Talking to my daughter late at night, One thought, one grace, which is about a woman reading and so much more, and Nostalgia, about the closing of a cobbler's shop. Changing world and a changing time, things gone that will be no more but remembered fondly, wistfully. This is a grouping of poems I can see myself reading again and again.
ARC from Publisher.
ARC from Publisher.
August 13, 2016
My review of this book appears on The Rumpus today: http://therumpus.net/2014/12/a-woman-...
October 22, 2023
Klackala je između 3 i 5, pa nek idu 4⭐️, iskreno se nadajući da je pjesnikinja našla put do sebe i svog doma! I bez obzira na određenu povezanost sa njom, naše me stihostvaračice ipak bolje dirnu 😊!
July 3, 2018
This is probably the first collection I've read this year that I didn't love. I think this might be a case of me not being an avid poetry reader. The poems themselves were beautifully written and a few of them I really enjoyed. This sounds weird but with some of the poems I kind of felt like I was being shouted at. My favourite section was definitely 'A Woman Without a Country' and I liked the 6 lessons in particular.
August 25, 2019
It could have been longer.
March 15, 2022
Overall, mostly okay. One poem (For That Called Body is a Portion of Soul) stood out to me. Others had moments of brilliance.
Not one I will revisit, but not a waste of time either.
Not one I will revisit, but not a waste of time either.
December 22, 2022
True. Painful. Romantic.
June 7, 2020
While many GR readers say they liked the title section best among the work here, I really appreciated the entire book.
"When I was expecting my second child,
my mother turned to me. She said,
_Surely you don't believe
you're two souls at this moment?_"
--from For that Called Body is a Portion of the Soul
A Soldier in the 28th Massachusetts
If his cause is American,
and his gun British--
a muzzle-lading musket
made in Enfield--
the features underneath
the blue forage cap are
Irish: a rough-cut intagliio
incised in a hidden history
of a shoreline receding
into a rainy distance
that eased out in the end
to reveal another coast
whose leaves are turning
this September evening
by the green incline
of Antietam Creek.
And if this soldier in
the 28th Massachusetts is
to hold himself in readiness
for the reckoning
with his new countrymen,
let him not remember
not once,
his old ones. Better to forget
the deep-water harbor,
the ship waiting, his father
on the dock with a contract
ticket for his wife and son,
weeping helplessly
in the arms of his brother.
"When I was expecting my second child,
my mother turned to me. She said,
_Surely you don't believe
you're two souls at this moment?_"
--from For that Called Body is a Portion of the Soul
A Soldier in the 28th Massachusetts
If his cause is American,
and his gun British--
a muzzle-lading musket
made in Enfield--
the features underneath
the blue forage cap are
Irish: a rough-cut intagliio
incised in a hidden history
of a shoreline receding
into a rainy distance
that eased out in the end
to reveal another coast
whose leaves are turning
this September evening
by the green incline
of Antietam Creek.
And if this soldier in
the 28th Massachusetts is
to hold himself in readiness
for the reckoning
with his new countrymen,
let him not remember
not once,
his old ones. Better to forget
the deep-water harbor,
the ship waiting, his father
on the dock with a contract
ticket for his wife and son,
weeping helplessly
in the arms of his brother.
October 8, 2024
“Follow / the line you wrote / as if it were salt”
“Just that name enough to make a sparkle / on the skin I could say was fever / and I know is shame.”
“We were strangers here once. Now / Someone else / Is living out their first springtime under these hills. / Someone else / Feels the sudden ease that comes when the wind veers / South and warms rain. / Would any of it come back to us if we gave it another name?”
“Just that name enough to make a sparkle / on the skin I could say was fever / and I know is shame.”
“We were strangers here once. Now / Someone else / Is living out their first springtime under these hills. / Someone else / Feels the sudden ease that comes when the wind veers / South and warms rain. / Would any of it come back to us if we gave it another name?”
February 26, 2021
Eavan taught me Irish literature in Dublin in 1987. I have read and followed her since. Her poems rank among my favorites; and this collection stands near the top of my list. It's a great story about history and emigrating and taking on a new land as the one you've left changes. Her typical themes offer a landscape of motherhood, family, faith, history, Ireland and it's relation to the UK.
August 18, 2023
3.5
I very much enjoyed the theme (which is the reason I picked this up in the first place), and the last two poems particularly really wrapped up the collection nicely. However, a lot of the middle fell a bit flat for me.
I very much enjoyed the theme (which is the reason I picked this up in the first place), and the last two poems particularly really wrapped up the collection nicely. However, a lot of the middle fell a bit flat for me.
March 28, 2016
A moving and lyrical book about women's cultural identity lost in the press of history....
March 19, 2020
if love is a civilization,
as i once hoped it was,
and you and i are its living citizens
and if our words
are less than rules and more than remedies
as we speak, maybe
someone escapes from a wounded morning
in a small classroom and finds
the world is not stern, after all.
as i once hoped it was,
and you and i are its living citizens
and if our words
are less than rules and more than remedies
as we speak, maybe
someone escapes from a wounded morning
in a small classroom and finds
the world is not stern, after all.
March 31, 2020
favorites - advice to an imagist, cityscape, eurydice speaks, the "a woman without a country" sequence
April 18, 2021
Reflections and lessons learned:
Little standout in the collection - shame. I did enjoy the word analysis of ‘The Port of New York: 1956’ but it wasn’t enough unfortunately
Little standout in the collection - shame. I did enjoy the word analysis of ‘The Port of New York: 1956’ but it wasn’t enough unfortunately
February 18, 2016
I really loved this book, it was very beautiful.
Read
June 3, 2025EURYDICE SPEAKS
How will I know you in the underworld?
How will we find each other?
We lived for so long on the physical earth—
Our skies littered with actual stars
Practical tides in our bay—
What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?
Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls,
By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him
On the shore of a river written and rewritten
As elegy, epic, epode.
Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?
Frost was an iron, underhand descent.
Dusk was always in session
And no one needed to write down
Or restate, or make a record of, or ever would,
And never will,
The plainspoken music of recognition,
Nor the way I often stood at the window—
The hills growing dark, saying,
As a shadow became a stride
And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight
I would know you anywhere.
FOR THAT CALLED BODY IS A PORTION OF SOUL
On winter evenings, when she finished painting,
my mother's plain handled brushes
were left soaking in
a lost summer—
not in distilled turpentine ready to be dipped in
cadmium, alizarine, the colors
of skin and drizzle
but in this
product of sand, product of silica:
sensory transient of the process
of making the dense clear,
little jam jar
making obvious in alliteration its origin
in a hot afternoon when crab apples
were pulled down
from treetops
boiled in a copper pot,
poured into glass and left cooling:
a scalded jewel on a pantry shelf.
Only to be
emptied out again
filled with turpentine—
a winter emblem of dualities:
Even the crab apple is seeking
a sky of inferences to constellate with:
the rosiness of a larger fruit,
the hint of a sea creature sidling in
another element.
When I was expecting my second child
my mother turned to me. She said
Surely you don't believe
you're two souls at this moment?
See also: "Amethyst Beads and "An Island of Daughters"
How will I know you in the underworld?
How will we find each other?
We lived for so long on the physical earth—
Our skies littered with actual stars
Practical tides in our bay—
What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?
Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls,
By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him
On the shore of a river written and rewritten
As elegy, epic, epode.
Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?
Frost was an iron, underhand descent.
Dusk was always in session
And no one needed to write down
Or restate, or make a record of, or ever would,
And never will,
The plainspoken music of recognition,
Nor the way I often stood at the window—
The hills growing dark, saying,
As a shadow became a stride
And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight
I would know you anywhere.
FOR THAT CALLED BODY IS A PORTION OF SOUL
On winter evenings, when she finished painting,
my mother's plain handled brushes
were left soaking in
a lost summer—
not in distilled turpentine ready to be dipped in
cadmium, alizarine, the colors
of skin and drizzle
but in this
product of sand, product of silica:
sensory transient of the process
of making the dense clear,
little jam jar
making obvious in alliteration its origin
in a hot afternoon when crab apples
were pulled down
from treetops
boiled in a copper pot,
poured into glass and left cooling:
a scalded jewel on a pantry shelf.
Only to be
emptied out again
filled with turpentine—
a winter emblem of dualities:
Even the crab apple is seeking
a sky of inferences to constellate with:
the rosiness of a larger fruit,
the hint of a sea creature sidling in
another element.
When I was expecting my second child
my mother turned to me. She said
Surely you don't believe
you're two souls at this moment?
See also: "Amethyst Beads and "An Island of Daughters"
Read
November 28, 202313
A subject people knows this.
The first loss is through history.
The final one is through language.
14
It is time to go back to where I came from.
--Rereading Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village in a Changed Ireland
I bought my copy of A Woman Without a Country on a work trip about five years ago, and I selected it the way I select most poetry books: the cover caught my eye, the title caught my ear, and at least one line while flipping through caught my heart. And then it sat on my shelf for years until I decided 2023 was the year I would read a poetry book each month, and November was the month for this one.
It feels like the appropriate time to have read it. Though I knew nothing about the subject matter when I bought it, the poems are concerned with the Irish diaspora and its associated losses, colonialism, the way that eroded history and language fallen into disuse (or forced into it) result in a loss of identity. It strikes a similar mood as "Butchered Tongue" on Hozier's Unreal Unearth, an album I've been listening to a lot since its release this year. I like how these two unrelated works can extend a hand to one another in my mind.
A subject people knows this.
The first loss is through history.
The final one is through language.
14
It is time to go back to where I came from.
--Rereading Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village in a Changed Ireland
I bought my copy of A Woman Without a Country on a work trip about five years ago, and I selected it the way I select most poetry books: the cover caught my eye, the title caught my ear, and at least one line while flipping through caught my heart. And then it sat on my shelf for years until I decided 2023 was the year I would read a poetry book each month, and November was the month for this one.
It feels like the appropriate time to have read it. Though I knew nothing about the subject matter when I bought it, the poems are concerned with the Irish diaspora and its associated losses, colonialism, the way that eroded history and language fallen into disuse (or forced into it) result in a loss of identity. It strikes a similar mood as "Butchered Tongue" on Hozier's Unreal Unearth, an album I've been listening to a lot since its release this year. I like how these two unrelated works can extend a hand to one another in my mind.
January 24, 2020
A complete stunner of a collection!
A Woman Without A Country
As dawn breaks he enters
A room with the odor of acid.
He lays the copper plate on the table.
And reaches for the shaft of the burin.
Dublin wakes to horses and rain.
Street hawkers call.
All the news is famine and famine.
The flat graver, the round graver,
The angle tint tool wait for him.
He bends to his work and begins.
He starts with the head, cutting in
To the line of the cheek, finding
The slope of the skull, incising
The shape of a face that becomes
A foundry of shadows, rendering —
With a deeper cut into copper —
The whole woman as a skeleton,
The rags of her skirt, her wrist
In a bony line forever
severing
Her body from its native air until
She is ready for the page,
For the street vendor, for
A new inventory which now
To loss and to laissez-faire adds
The odor of acid and the little,
Pitiless tragedy of being imagined.
He puts his tools away,
One by one; lays them out carefully
On the deal table, his work done.
A Woman Without A Country
As dawn breaks he enters
A room with the odor of acid.
He lays the copper plate on the table.
And reaches for the shaft of the burin.
Dublin wakes to horses and rain.
Street hawkers call.
All the news is famine and famine.
The flat graver, the round graver,
The angle tint tool wait for him.
He bends to his work and begins.
He starts with the head, cutting in
To the line of the cheek, finding
The slope of the skull, incising
The shape of a face that becomes
A foundry of shadows, rendering —
With a deeper cut into copper —
The whole woman as a skeleton,
The rags of her skirt, her wrist
In a bony line forever
severing
Her body from its native air until
She is ready for the page,
For the street vendor, for
A new inventory which now
To loss and to laissez-faire adds
The odor of acid and the little,
Pitiless tragedy of being imagined.
He puts his tools away,
One by one; lays them out carefully
On the deal table, his work done.
December 31, 2020
Boland's poem Talking to my Daughter Late at Night is a call for recovery from trauma through connection: “If love is a civilization
As I once hoped it was,
And you are I are it’s living citizens
And if our words
Are less than rules and more than remedies
As we speak, maybe
Someone escapes from a wounded morning
In a small classroom and finds
The world is not stern after all”
And her poem Advice to an Imagist ranks now with the art of losing as my favorite poetry advice "Follow/the line you wrote/as if it were salt--not" continuing in a reminder of what salt is *not* and ending with a reminder that language always does more than you think. This is not even touching on the titular section A Woman Withour A Country of which lesson #5 reads like an anti-invocation of muses "her flesh was flesh not wood or ink or marble".
I hadn't read Boland in about 10 years and clearly that was a mistake.
As I once hoped it was,
And you are I are it’s living citizens
And if our words
Are less than rules and more than remedies
As we speak, maybe
Someone escapes from a wounded morning
In a small classroom and finds
The world is not stern after all”
And her poem Advice to an Imagist ranks now with the art of losing as my favorite poetry advice "Follow/the line you wrote/as if it were salt--not" continuing in a reminder of what salt is *not* and ending with a reminder that language always does more than you think. This is not even touching on the titular section A Woman Withour A Country of which lesson #5 reads like an anti-invocation of muses "her flesh was flesh not wood or ink or marble".
I hadn't read Boland in about 10 years and clearly that was a mistake.
Read
January 2, 2024faves:
- The Lost Art of Letter Writing
- Talking to My Daughter Late at Night
- Eurydice Speaks
- Song and Error
- The Long Evening of Their Leave-takings & Lesson 4
- An Island of Daughters
- For That Called Body
Is a Portion of Soul
- An Irish Georgic
- The Wife’s Lament (translation)
- Wedding Poem
- Rereading Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” in a Changed Ireland
- The Port of New York: 1956
- Becoming Anne Bradstreet
- The Lost Art of Letter Writing
- Talking to My Daughter Late at Night
- Eurydice Speaks
- Song and Error
- The Long Evening of Their Leave-takings & Lesson 4
- An Island of Daughters
- For That Called Body
Is a Portion of Soul
- An Irish Georgic
- The Wife’s Lament (translation)
- Wedding Poem
- Rereading Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” in a Changed Ireland
- The Port of New York: 1956
- Becoming Anne Bradstreet
December 6, 2020
Honest, often searing, always lyrical, Eavan Boland's poems cut to the heart of human feelings. Loss, longing, and the Irish experience are her frequent subjects. Her images are sharp and true. In this collection are some of the finest poems I've read, such as "An Island of Daughters," the aggrieved and moving "Reading the Victorian Novel," and "Talking to My Daughter Late at Night."
Read
February 8, 2021Gah, I loved this collection. When I was in Dublin two summers ago, I wanted to buy a book of poems by a poet of Irish descent. I found Boland and was intrigued by the title. These poems exude a richness of thought, control of English language, and rhythmic inquiries into language, history and diaspora. I recommend this collection highly.
June 7, 2021
Really enjoyed this. Loved how it made you sit and think about place and belonging. I wish it were longer!
I love a Orpheus/Eurydice reference so “Eurydice Speaks” was my favorite. “How will I know you in the underworld?/How will we find each other?... I would know you anywhere.” Are you KIDDING! Stunning.
I love a Orpheus/Eurydice reference so “Eurydice Speaks” was my favorite. “How will I know you in the underworld?/How will we find each other?... I would know you anywhere.” Are you KIDDING! Stunning.
November 8, 2023
Devoured this collection in the library and promptly went online and ordered it. Every poem is a gem and I can’t emphasize how much I love Eavan Boland and how both readable and complex her poetry is.
May 1, 2024
“What troubled me was
not whether she had included her country in her
short life. But whether that country had included
her.”
Gripping reading this driving through the landscapes eavan boland describes so viscerally
not whether she had included her country in her
short life. But whether that country had included
her.”
Gripping reading this driving through the landscapes eavan boland describes so viscerally
Read
April 27, 2020Such a wonderful wordsmith who could wrap you in a blanket and calm your tears
February 15, 2021
maybe I should stop reading books just cuz they’re written by irish people
April 17, 2022
I keeping going back to this book so much that I simply want to crawl inside its pages and just ... hang there for a little while. As you can tell, I love this so much (and I am not a poetry girlie under normal circumstances!!!) that I refuse to critically engage with it and will only tell you all one thing - it slaps. every single poem is a hit.
June 5, 2022
in my irish lit summer
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews