A Poet's Dublin

by Eavan Boland

Juxtaposing verse and image, A Poet’s Dublin is a study of origin and influence from “a major Irish poet” (Edward Hirsch). Written over years, the transcendent and moving poems in A Poet’s Dublin seek out shadows and impressions of a powerful, historic city, studying how it forms and alters language, memory, and selfhood. The poems range from an evocation of the neighborhoods under the hills where the poet lived and raised her children to the inner-city bombing of 1974, and include such signature poems as “The Pomegranate,” “The War Horse,” and “Anna Liffey.” Above all, these poems weave together the story of a self and a city―private, political, and bound by history. The poems are supported by photographs of the city at all times and in all seasons: from dawn on the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, to twilight up in the Dublin foothills. 45 photographs

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature

176 pages, Hardcover

Published November 8, 2016

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maker of / Places, remembrances, / Narrate such fragments for me:

Forgive me, this is and is not a proper review of Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, though I shall begin speaking first of the collection at hand. As stated by Jody Allen Randolph in the collection’s introduction, a place ‘finds its identity from being imagined,’ and what better avenue to the imagination than story and poetry. This collection of Boland’s work--originally published to celebrate the esteemed poet’s seventieth birthday--draws from her entire oeuvre a magnificent catalog of poetry (including her most famous poem, The Pomegranate concerning a mother/daughter relationship through an exquisite Persephone metaphor) and sets it to commingle with her own photography in order to best locate the poetic pulse of this extraordinary and literary city. This collection is like the Grey’s Anatomy of Dublin, a user’s guide to the mythologies of everyday lives, loves, sights and sounds that flow through the arteries of Dublin’s past and present. Forgive me if I add another heartbeat into the history of this near-mythical place; forgive me, Boland, for using this space to chronicle my own story but your own words of lifetimes lived along the Liffey have captured my heart and i must set that heart to task. Along the Liffey, I, too, learned and loved, a grown man discovering that his view of life, once thought of as matured and secured, was merely a perch on a lower branch of understanding. When you think you have a fully bloomed grasp on life, reach higher--there are many more limbs to climb and joys to discover.

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.

When I first encountered this collection, Dublin was mostly just a spot on a map for me. A place I’d heard of, had learned a bit of the history, but that was it. Then, as the best stories go, I met a girl. But not just any girl. This was a girl who breathed poetry, whose heartbeat was pristine prose. A girl with history teeming in the sway of her red hair, an immeasurable ocean of knowledge in her green eyes. It seems foolish, i realize now, to employ the diminutive term ‘girl’, forgive me, for I am speaking of a woman. A woman of grace and strength, a brave independence the Greeks would have erected marble statues to, and a face for which ancient armies would have gone to war. Boland, surely you would appreciate so strong a heroine as those that populate your prose. But perhaps ‘woman’, too, is unjust. This is a person, a person we can all admire, a person like a fountain of joy and love drenching this dry world of fears and sorrows. But I digress. From the first moment I saw her, I knew I’d follow wherever she led, like following a faerie into the forest in the old tales. So follow her I have, and I found myself stepping off a plane into the morning air of Dublin, Ireland where she stood waiting for my arrival. Dublin took on a new meaning for me and became like the sought after kingdoms of myths and faerie tales. A magical place with a strong literary past and love for poetry. You cannot travel down Grafton Street amidst the buskers and bustling crowds while hand-in-hand with the one you love and not think of Patrick Kavanagh’s Ragland Road: ‘On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge / Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge’ (see also: Ragland Road as performed by The Dubliners) You cannot move an inch without thinking of Bloom making his way through Ulysses, or all the stories in Dubliners. Any visitor should certainly check out the Icon Walk to immerse themselves in Dublin’s literary and artistic history.

Make of a nation what you will
Make of the past
What you can—

There is now
A woman in a doorway.

It has taken me
All my strength to do this.

Becoming a figure in a poem.

Usurping a name and a theme.

(from Anna Liffey)

There few experiences more lovely in life than the moments when you feel you're a flesh-and-blood character in a novel. Life seems to buzz with meaning—each footfall feels like a new sentence, every bend in the street the turning of a page all marching to the beat of a narrative within you have found yourself happily immersed. This is the powerful play of Dublin life to which I have contributed a verse, small as it may be, with a fresh life that begins with falling in love with a female poet studying language theory in an Ireland filled with myth. Boland, who also attended the same Uni as my own love, has written:

Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word ‘woman’ invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word ‘poet’…I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.

There is a strong, feminist individuality at work in Boland's poetry, carving out a space of one's own in an Ireland rife with mythology and history. Her poems capture the broad scope of Irish history yet retain a specific individuality, most often chronicling the female experience in a highly personal—yet, universal—amalgamation. This is a celebration of cultural identity (Boland was born in Dublin yet spent her young life in London and New York that helped nudge her towards coveting a strong Irish sense of identity to oppose the anti-Irish bigotry that plagued those foreign cultures) that makes a modern person feel like another proud verse in a proud heritage. The intermingling of past and present is also reflected in her prose styling, which at once feels both modern and rooted in traditional poetry. While her poems may not rhyme and have a more modern structure and layout, she also often employs meter and form from the playbook of traditional techniques. There is a distinctly European aesthetic alive in her work that amplifies the context and underlying themes of the poems. What is most wonderful is her sincere and unabashed gaze at the whole of history, pulling no punches and presenting an honest portrait of Irish identity that is not fetishized or reduced to novelty such as the way Americans, for example, celebrate St. Patrick's Day. 'I am your citizen,' she writes in The Harbour, 'composed of / your fictions, your compromise, I am / a part of your story and it's outcome. / And ready to record its contradictions.'

A place lives within us just as much as we live within it. Our histories become intertwined like lovers, our narrative a harmony in the orchestra of place. 'We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland,' Boland writes in Irish Poetry, continuing a few lines later to 'speak of our own gods. / Our heartbroken pantheon.' Our lives populate the mythos of a culture, Boland shows how we become the living legends in the epic narrative that is our personal lives. I came to Dublin and found my heart—a modern quest faerie tale that I hope ends with 'happily ever after'. I left pieces of my soul all across the landscape, trading them for joyful memories of love and laughter through the bustling streets, across the green fields, beside the sea, in the bookstores and bars, transit lines and taxis. It was like discovering a map of my heart, finally knowing where I belong and with whom I want to spend it. There is a certain cartography to human emotion that poetry is able to create, and this collection is well-served by breaking the three segments of the book geographically (city, river, hills) to better traverse the poetic landscapes.

A Poet's Dublin is a fantastic collection, through and through. This thematic selected works of the prestigious poet Eavan Boland would make a wonderful selection for anyone hoping to acquaint themselves with her work (or even for those already well acquainted) or simply immerse themselves in an imagined Dublin to better feel the flow of it's soul. This is a powerful study of identity, culture, feminism and place that has taken root deep in my heart. Though I am writing this from the United States, my heart remains across the ocean with the woman I love and will always love, the woman to whom I give myself fully to in life, marriage, and beyond. This collection feels like an artifact of our history which we are constantly making, as we met because of poetry and on our first date she showed me many of Boland poems (including Atlantis--A Lost Sonnet, which is included above). Pick up a poem, let it sink into you, let it illuminate the world around you and you too can feel the magic and myth of our everyday lives. 'In the end' Boland writes, 'everything that burdened and distinguished me / will be lost in this: / I was a voice.' The body dies, but the voice always echoes on.
5/5

Once

The lovers of 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.

Did you know our suburb was a forest?
Our roof was a home for thrushes.
Our front door was a wild shadow of spruce.

Our faces edged in mountain freshness,
we too our milk in where the wide apart
prints of the wild and never-seen
creatures were set who have long since died out.

I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky.
To listen for our own death in the distance
Take my hand. Stand by the window.

I want to show you what is hidden in
this ordinary, ageing human love is
there still and will until

an inland coast so densely wooded
not even the ocean fog could enter it
appears in front of us and the chilled-
to-the-bone light clears and shows us

Irish wolves. A silvery man and wife.
Yellow-eyed. Edged in dateless moonlight.
They are mated for life. They are legendary. They are safe.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The city I was born in.
The river that runs through it.
The nation which eludes me.

Fractions of a life
It has taken me a lifetime
To claim.

As its title makes plain, this volume is Eavan Boland's poetic exploration of Dublin, a city she lived in as a young child, left, and then returned to as a teenager. Because Boland spent most of her growing-up years in London and New York, she struggles with the feeling that Dublin is not quite in her bones, not threaded throughout her being, in the way she seems to think it should be in order for her to attempt to capture it. Boland addresses this struggle by dividing A Poet's Dublin into three sections, concerning the city itself, where she went to college; the river Liffey; and the suburb of Dundrum where she settled as a married young adult and eventually became a mother. Boland's attempts to figure out what the city has meant to her, how to reconcile its history and future with her own history and future, are revealed to captivating effect in these lovely contemplative poems from over the course of her career.

In the first section, “City of Shadows,” Boland grapples with a nagging sense of the unknowability of not only Dublin, but also her college-aged self as a resident of that city. The person she was as a teenage student at Trinity seems somewhat mysterious, and the reader gets the sense that Boland feels she can no longer speak for that person:

I want to find her,
the woman I once was,
who came out of that reading-room
in a hard January, after studying
Aeneas in the underworld…

Indeed, Boland seems to doubt whether she even has the tools to speak of her past, and the city of her past, and is unsure whether it matters anyway:

…here am I,
…with nothing to assist me but the last
and most fabulous of beasts—language, language—
which knows, as I do, that it’s too late
to record the loss of these things but does so anyway,
and anxiously, in case it shares their fate.

If Boland feels on shaky ground when speaking of the city of her past, she regains some footing when talking of the river Liffey, which she sees as an artery that gives life: “Dawn on the river. / Dublin rises out of what reflects it.” This second section of the book, entitled “Gifts of the River,” is a necessary bridge between Boland’s uncertainty about the city of Dublin and her own past selves and the more self-assured person and writer of the book’s third section. Indeed, in “The Harbour,” she finally seems to stop struggling with her uncertainties and embrace them:

…I am your citizen: composed of
your fictions, your compromise, I am
a part of your story and its outcome.
And ready to record its contradictions.

In “Under These Hills,” the section on the suburbs, Boland seems finally on solid ground, writing as a person who has grown into someone she recognizes, who is no longer as unsure about her place in her own story. In addition to writing about marriage and motherhood, she addresses the changing suburbs themselves: “They are making a new Ireland / at the end of our road, / under our very eyes….” While she seems to both welcome this and understand its inevitability, she expresses some of the apprehension change always brings:

In a spring dusk I walk to Town Centre,
I stand listening to a small river,
Closed in and weeping.
Everyone leaving in the dusk with a single bag,
The way souls are said to enter the underworld
With one belonging
And no one remembering.

Nonetheless, this section is the most forward-looking of the three. The Dublin of Boland’s past may not have been one she quite understood, but this new incarnation of Dublin and its environs is one she sees clearly. Thus the arc of A Poet’s Dublin is complete; childhood and history and struggle eventually give way to a clear-eyed exploration and tentative acceptance of the future.

This is a truly lovely book. I struggled to write this review simply because there were just so many beautiful poems I wanted to quote here. In addition to the poems themselves, which have been gathered and curated from over the course of Boland’s writing life, the book is illustrated with black-and-white photos Boland has taken more recently, expressly for this volume. A Poet’s Dublin also includes an introduction written by one of its editors, as well as a lengthy conversation between Boland and the poet Paula Meehan about the challenges of being a poet of a particular place. All of it works together to provide a unique and fascinating look at the city and the poet, one that will reward repeated readings. More than anything else I’ve read in recent memory, this book seems poised to become a classic among poets and writers. Boland’s fears about the limits of language in the face of history are unfounded; A Poet’s Dublin is destined to endure.

[Keith Bruton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Poet's Dublin by Eavan Boland 
.
Eavan Boland is an Irish treasure. I remember studying her poetry in secondary school back in 2009/10. For my final exams I studied W.B. Yeats, Michael Longely, Patrick Kavanagh and Eavan Boland.
.
I really had a strong connection with her work and after ten years or so I needed to read her poems again. This collection focuses on Dublin and they are simply heartbreaking and stunning at the same time. My personal favourites are: THE WAR HORSE, CHILD OF OUR TIME, THE SCAR, ANNA LIFFEY and THE DOLLS MUSEUM IN DUBLIN
.
We can easily put Boland in the best poets Ireland has ever produced. She was simply sublime. I missed out on a chance to see her do a reading of her poetry a few years ago before she died in 2020. Highly recommend her work.

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boland's importance and mastery of her craft are clear. There were many fine lines in this book—whose poems spanned several decades—but when I took a step back and regarded each poem as a whole, I felt that a lot of them didn't cohere. (This was not because of a lack of symbolic echoes and thematic repetition; there were plenty of those.)

Perhaps I can't respond to her restricted gestures toward story-telling (as in "The Pomegranate"). There are also rhetorical flourishes I find overly dramatic. ("Facing the paradox. Learning to die of it.")

Boland's photographs are excellent and enhance the book a lot. Unfortunately, I have never been to Dublin, so many references in the book probably passed me by. My favorite among the poems was "How the Dance Came to the City."

[James Dempsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a very beautiful collection. It is my first time acquainted with Boland, after the library name change. In principle I felt bound to defend the honour of old Berkeley, attacked as he was for being a mind of his time. But as times change so must we change with them, and unfortunately that man’s dexterous philosophy belonged to a time bygone. His immaterialism had turned material; change seemed to be written on the wall from which his name had been removed. His grave pietism and tricky dialogues failed to inspire or placate a rabid youth, who sought his metaphorical head on a metaphorical stick and his spirit vacuumed from the great hall of learning that was grown in his name. When he left Long Island, after failing to establish a school there - but where more importantly as we all know he committed his grave crimes against humanity - he donated all the books which he had collected to Harvard University, then in its mewling and drooling stages of development. Back in Trinity however, his grey dawn of bygone philosophy was thus to be followed by a pastel splash; by the pleasant petrichor of a Boland spring! I will read the work of her life back to front. It seems to me that she mourns for younger days; well this is said explicitly. She misses the flower of her youth deeply. I myself, for one, hope inversely for a brighter spring in the future!

[Ronan Doyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I praise
The gifts of the river.
Its shiftless and glittering
Re-telling of a city
Its clarity as it flows,
In the company of runt flowers and herons,
Around a bend at Islandbridge

Many mornings at dawn or before, I walk the Liffey at Islandbridge, among runt flowers and herons, and not another soul. I don't tend to think of Eavan Boland, or didn't at least; since picking this up, the first full book of Boland's poetry I've read since the obligatory school introduction—her memoir, Object Lessons, I did gobble up with relish—it's hard not to pass the runt flowers and herons without her in mind.

That poem, "Anna Liffey", is a beautiful confluence of mythology, history, geography, politics, biography: of the world and the self. So it is with most poems in this volume, neatly edited around an abstract idea of the city—though not so neatly for its momentum to keep me flipping back, time and again, powerless to the pull of "Anna Liffey".

She ends it so:

In the end
It will not matter
That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
The body is a source. Nothing more.
There is a time for it. There is a certainty
About the way it seeks its own dissolution.
Consider rivers.
They are always en route to
Their own nothingness. From the first moment
They are going home. And so
When language cannot do it for us,
Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,
There are these phrases
Of the ocean
To console us.
Particular and unafraid of their completion.
In the end
Everything that burdened and distinguished me
Will be lost in this:
I was a voice.

She was. I hear it now on the river.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished: 08.03.2019
Genre: poetry
Rating: A
#ReadingIrelandMonth19
Conclusion:
Not facts, not figures.....but feelings

My Thoughts

[T P Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a very stimulating collection of poems with some great photographs. As an insight into the poet's relationship with Dublin it works well. That said, it's a slender volume with 23 pages devoted to a meandering conversation with another poet about Dublin. I'd have sooner had some more verses and images. Overall, a lovely collection if a little slight.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this as an advanced reader's copy, and the only thing I wish more than to dive back into these poems is to have a physical copy of this collection so that I may more fully immerse myself. I can't believe that I have lived as long as I have without having been introduced to Eavan Boland's poetry.

She gracefully travels through the city of Dublin, walking along its streets as both native and outsider. Her observations and wordplay acknowledge several Dublins defined by politics and tragedy, family and feminine strength, culture and socioeconomic divides. I also really enjoyed the conversation between Paula Meehan and Eavan Bolan about how the city has shaped their lives and influenced their work over the years.

My digital copy showed small, awkwardly oriented photographs between the lines of many poems that interrupted the flow while reading, but the beauty of the words and the images they invoke will only be enhanced when the photographs of the subjects lay side by side with them. I can't wait to see it in person.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very pleasing volume by one of Ireland's finest poets. The poems are offset with a variety of photographs, all black and white, taken in and around Dublin and thematically relate (albeit sometimes rather loosely) to the poems. In cases where the connection between photo and poem is a little more opaque, the author provides some helpful notations in the back of the book. A special treat was the concluding conversation between Boland and the poet Paula Meehan regarding Dublin and the impact of their writing and reading on their experience of the city. For those who have been to Dublin this book will provoke a confirming nod from the reader as she recognizes herself and her experience of the city strange but undeniable magic. For those who have not yet visited, this book will provide a unique and idiosyncratic introduction to one of Europe's great cities.

[harithaolag · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really not sure how to go about reviewing poetry, seeing as I'm by no means well-versed. However, it is necessary to point out the success of Irish indoctrination, seeing as I'm picking up a collection from a Leaving Cert poet out of my own will. As for the book itself, I loved some of the poems, particularly 'Heroic', 'Unheroic' (can someone please verify if there's a connection between the two?!), 'The Proof that Plato Was Wrong', 'This Moment', 'Night Feed' and 'In Our Own Country'. These were very hard-hitting yet delicate. I loved the analysis of rigid class divides in Dublin, and the description of youth culture. As for some of the others, I honestly didn't fully grasp their concepts (hence the high star rating - I'm not going to lower it because of my own stupidity), and others I found to be a little pretentious. The conversation at the back was a brilliant addition though!

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in one sitting today. I was deeply moved by it. By the photographs, some of the places Eavan photographed I seen when in Dublin. She was my teacher in 1987 and remains my favorite Irish poet. Her death a year ago was followed a month later by my Mother's death, and then the sudden death of my best friend in December 2020. I want to put 2020 behind me as far as I can. The closing conversation between Paula Meehan and Eavan is magical.

[Bex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I would have enjoyed this a little more if I was familiar with Dublin and it's history; however, even without this knowledge, it was a really fantastic read. There were lots of personal parallel's to be drawn, and Boland's use of language is beautiful. The section at the back- featuring a discussion around the writing of place- was maybe my favourite part, it was very informative and insightful.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good art often speaks for itself, but it’s still enjoyable to read conversations and notes on poems and premises like those found here. The collection itself is well curated, and the accompanying images add an aura of place and history. It’s a wonderful poetic profile of one artist’s relationship with her city.

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book of poems and pictures on Dublin weaving myth, history, the personal, and the communal. A dialogue between Eavan and her contemporary Paula Meehan in the back further illuminates the themes, process, and philosophy of poetry - a perfect example of a city as a conglomeration of experience and imagination.

[Ignacio Sanz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was fascinating. Shocking to me. There are not that many poetry books concentrated in Dublin as a subject and landmark of inspiration. My favorite poem was one about the origin of the Liffey and how if any, it has to be a woman

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed hearing the poems and essays of Eavan Boland in, around and related to Dublin Ireland. Some word ring true to me even though I don't know Dublin well, but have visited a few times.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Mary Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tribute to the writing of Eavan Boland who died recently. Both the photographs and the poetry provide a visit to the city of Dublin and the Irish character.

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely set of poems. Need to send to a friend who lived in Dublin for a bit.

[aoife · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful reflection on building yourself a place at home after childhood diaspora

[Jaiden Truhe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorites — Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet, An Elegy For My Mother In Which She Rarely Appears, Anna Liffey, And Soul, A Marriage For The Millenium

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Dublin and I have had a rocky relationship; it's a city where something unpleasant happens to me every time I visit. This collection of poetry allowed me to see it a different way; I particularly liked the short histories provided in connection with the photographs accompanying the poems.