Carcanet Press - New Collected Poems

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O swan by swan my heart goes down
Through Dublin town, through Dublin town.

from 'Liffeytown', 1962

Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). It also fills out the early record, reproducing two key poems from 23 Poems (1962), New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975) and her later books; it includes passages from her unpublished 1971 play Femininity and Freedom. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous.

Her writing and example are vitally enabling for young writers and readers; she traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement and patient experimentation with form, theme and language.

'Eavan Boland lives in a different world, one from which she can see not only "the Dublin mountains", but a looming poetic tradition and the wastes of European history... Her language has a tranquil control as well, for which it sacrifices nothing in grace or expressive power.' New York Times Book Review

Table of Contents

Author's Note

from 23 Poems 1962

Liffeytown

The Liffey beyond Islandbridge

New Territory 1967

The Poets

The Gryphons

The Pilgrim

New Territory

Mirages

Migration

The Dream of Lir's Son

Malediction

Lullaby

Belfast vs Dublin

Requiem for a Personal Friend

A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol

From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin

Shakespeare

The Comic Shakespeare

Yeats in Civil War

The Flight of the Earls

After the Irish of Egan O'Rahilly

The King and the Troubadour

Athene's Song

The Winning of Etain

from 'Femininity and Freedom' 1971

'Deidre and Cathal in conversation'

The War Horse 1975

The Other Woman

The War Horse

Child of Our Time

A Soldier's Son

The Famine Road

Cyclist with Cut Branches

Song

The Botanic Gardens

Prisoners

Ready for Flight

Sisters

The Laws of Love

The Family Tree

Naoise at Four

Anon

From the Irish of Pangur Ban

Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan

O Fons Bandusiae

Dependence Day

Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes

The Atlantic Ocean

Chorus of the Shadows

The Greek Experience

Suburban Woman

Ode to Suburbia

The Hanging Judge

In Her Own Image 1980

Tirade for the Mimic Muse

In Her Own Image

In His Own Image

Anorexic

Mastectomy

Solitary

Menses

Witching

Exhibitionist

Making Up

Night Feed 1980

Domestic Interior

Night Feed

Before Spring

Energies

Hymn

Partings

Endings

Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray

Lights

After a Childhood Away from Ireland

Monotony

The Muse Mother

A Ballad of Home

Patchwork or the Poet's Craft

In the Garden

Degas's Laundresses

Woman in Kitchen

Woman Posing

It's a Woman's World

Tirade for the Epic Muse

The New Pastoral

On Renoir's The Grape Pickers

'Daphne with her thighs in bark'

The Woman Changes Her Skin

The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish

The Woman in the Fur Shop

The Woman as Mummy's Head

A Ballad of Beauty and Time

The Journey 1987

I

I Remember

Mise Eire

Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening

The Oral Tradition

Fever

The Unlived Life

Lace

The Bottle Garden

Suburban Woman: A Detail

The Briar Rose

The Women

Nocturne

The Fire in Our Neighbourhood

On Holiday

Growing Up

There and Back

The Wild Spray

II

The Journey

Envoi

III

Listen. This is the Noise of Myth

An Irish Childhood in England:1951

Fond Memory

Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland

The Emigrant Irish

Tirade for the Lyric Muse

The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon

The Glass King

Outside History

I Object Lessons

The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

The Rooms of Other Women Poets

Object Lessons

On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon

The Game

The Shadow Doll

The River

Mountain Time

The Latin Lesson

Bright-Cut Irish Silver

We Were Neutral in the War

II Outside History: A sequence

I The Achill Woman

II A False Spring

III The Making of an Irish Goddess

IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland

V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God

VI The Photograph on My Father's Desk

VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History

VIII An Old Steel Engraving

IX In Exile

X We Are Always Too Late

XI What We Lost

XII Outside History

III Distances

The Nights of Childhood

The Carousel in the Park

Contingencies

Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet

Our Origins Are in the Sea

Midnight Flowers

Doorstep Kisses

A Different Light

Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room

Ghost Stories

What Love Intended

Distances

In a Time of Violence 1994

The Singers

I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence

1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited

2 The Death of Reason

3 March 1 1847. By the First Post

4 In a Bad Light

5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin

6 Inscriptions

7 Beautiful Speech

II Legends

This Moment

Love

The Pomegranate

At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town

The Water-Clock

Moths

A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs

In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own

The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City

The Parcel

Lava Cameo

The Source

Legends

III Anna Liffey

Anna Liffey

Story

Time and Violence

The Art of Grief

A Woman Painted on a Leaf

The Lost Land 1998

I Colony

1 My Country in Darkness

2 The Harbour

3 Witness

4 Daughters of Colony

5 Imago

6 The Scar

7 City of Shadows

8 Unheroic

9 The Colonists

10 A Dream of Colony

11 A Habitable Grief

12 The Mother Tongue

II The Lost Land

Home

The Lost Land

Mother Ireland

The Blossom

Daughter

Ceres Looks at the Morning

Tree of Life

Escape

Dublin, 1959

Watching Old Movies When They Were New

Heroic

Happiness

The Last Discipline

The Proof that Plato Was Wrong

The Necessity for Irony

Formal Feeling

Whose?

Code 2001

I Marriage

I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission

II Against Love Poetry

III The Pinhole Camera

IV Quarantine

V Embers

VI Then

VII First Year

VIII Once

IX Thank�d be Fortune

X A Marriage for the Millennium

XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary

II Code

Limits

Code

Making Money

Exile! Exile!

Once in Dublin

How We Made a New Art on Old Ground

Emigrant Letters

The Burdens of a History

Horace Odes: II:XI

Echo

Hide this Place from Angels

Limits 2

How the Earth and All the Planets Were Created

A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago

Is It Still the Same

Suburban Woman: Another Detail

Irish Poetry

Index of First Lines

Index of Titles

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She has taught at Trinity College, University College and Bowdoin College Dublin, and at the University of Iowa. She is currently Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, ... read more

Praise for Eavan Boland Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. - Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011
Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. - Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011
Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. - Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011
'Over eight collections, her developing forms and subjects - the fabric of domestic life, myth, love, history and Irish rural landscape - have kept their commitment to lyrical grace and feminism.'
Ruth Padel, The Independent on Sunday, January 2000.

'A skilled and celebrated poet.'
Ken Gladdish, Poetry Quarterly Review, Autumn 1999.

'Eavan Boland's critical status has burgeoned in the last ten years to the point where she is now one of the major figures in contemporary Irish and women's poetry.'
The North magazine.

'This subtle, unadorned book is typical of Boland's powerfully persuasive manner as a poet.'
Michael Glover, The Independent on Sunday, October 1998.

'The internationally acclaimed Irish poet powerfully and movingly continues to merge private and mythic history.'
W.W. Norton books.

'She's a poet of both painterly and worldly engagements, equally attentive to the dance of the intellect and the testimony of the senses.'
The Boston Review.

'Thoughtful, spare and elgant verse from one of Ireland's most significant poets.'
Margaret Greenwood, The Rough Guide to Ireland.

'A modern romantic with impressive intellectual resources, Boland fulfils her desire to "bless the ordinary...sanctify the common." Her poems have a rare artistic resonance.'
Alan Bold, The Scotsman, 1987.

'She has the equipment of the true poet, that is to say an image-making faculty, a true devoted eye and an ear for rhythm.'
Iain Crichton Smith, Chapman magazine, 1989.

'Boland's gift is that she is always accessible, never elitist, but intelligent, striving and inclusive.'
Sue Hubbard, New Statesman and Society, 1996.

'The wealth of Eavan Boland's language is complemented by a visual wealth in metaphors.'
Anthony Libby, the New York Times, 1987.

'More than twenty years ago her voice was sweet and low and musical...now it has deepened in resonance and authority.'
Brian Kennelly, The Irish Times, 1986.

Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review Volume 96:3 Autumn 2006 �Swept, Emptied, Kept
Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century. read more

John Greening, Times Literary Supplement , 27th October 2006. read more

Anne Fogarty, The Irish Book Review , Volume I Number III Winter 2005:
Books of collected poems fulfil several competing purposes. read more

Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Times , 4th February, 2006:
Surviving the swans
Evan Boland's latest collection illustrates how she managed to escape from the grip of tradition
Reading Eavan Boland's powerful oeuvre in the New Collected Poems , one is immediately struck by the idea that persistent moral courage is a powerful technical advantage in a poet's work. read more

John Redmond, The Guardian , Saturday 18th February 2006
In the heaven of lost futures
John Redmond admires Eavan Boland's forlorn, regretful collection. read more

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New Collected Poems Eavan Boland RRP: GBP£ 14.95 Discount: 10% You Save: GBP£ 1.50 Price: GBP£ 13.45 Available Paperback ISBN: 978 1 857548 58 7 Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, Irish, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Published: November 2005 216 x 135 mm 280 pages Publisher: Carcanet Press Also available in: eBook (EPUB), eBook (Kindle) Description Excerpt Author Contents Reviews O swan by swan my heart goes down Through Dublin town, through Dublin town. from 'Liffeytown', 1962 Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). It also fills out the early record, reproducing two key poems from 23 Poems (1962), New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975) and her later books; it includes passages from her unpublished 1971 play Femininity and Freedom. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Her writing and example are vitally enabling for young writers and readers; she traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement and patient experimentation with form, theme and language. 'Eavan Boland lives in a different world, one from which she can see not only "the Dublin mountains", but a looming poetic tradition and the wastes of European history... Her language has a tranquil control as well, for which it sacrifices nothing in grace or expressive power.' New York Times Book Review Table of Contents Author's Note from 23 Poems 1962 Liffeytown The Liffey beyond Islandbridge New Territory 1967 The Poets The Gryphons The Pilgrim New Territory Mirages Migration The Dream of Lir's Son Malediction Lullaby Belfast vs Dublin Requiem for a Personal Friend A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin Shakespeare The Comic Shakespeare Yeats in Civil War The Flight of the Earls After the Irish of Egan O'Rahilly The King and the Troubadour Athene's Song The Winning of Etain from 'Femininity and Freedom' 1971 'Deidre and Cathal in conversation' The War Horse 1975 The Other Woman The War Horse Child of Our Time A Soldier's Son The Famine Road Cyclist with Cut Branches Song The Botanic Gardens Prisoners Ready for Flight Sisters The Laws of Love The Family Tree Naoise at Four Anon From the Irish of Pangur Ban Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan O Fons Bandusiae Dependence Day Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes The Atlantic Ocean Chorus of the Shadows The Greek Experience Suburban Woman Ode to Suburbia The Hanging Judge In Her Own Image 1980 Tirade for the Mimic Muse In Her Own Image In His Own Image Anorexic Mastectomy Solitary Menses Witching Exhibitionist Making Up Night Feed 1980 Domestic Interior Night Feed Before Spring Energies Hymn Partings Endings Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray Lights After a Childhood Away from Ireland Monotony The Muse Mother A Ballad of Home Patchwork or the Poet's Craft In the Garden Degas's Laundresses Woman in Kitchen Woman Posing It's a Woman's World Tirade for the Epic Muse The New Pastoral On Renoir's The Grape Pickers 'Daphne with her thighs in bark' The Woman Changes Her Skin The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish The Woman in the Fur Shop The Woman as Mummy's Head A Ballad of Beauty and Time The Journey 1987 I I Remember Mise Eire Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening The Oral Tradition Fever The Unlived Life Lace The Bottle Garden Suburban Woman: A Detail The Briar Rose The Women Nocturne The Fire in Our Neighbourhood On Holiday Growing Up There and Back The Wild Spray II The Journey Envoi III Listen. This is the Noise of Myth An Irish Childhood in England:1951 Fond Memory Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland The Emigrant Irish Tirade for the Lyric Muse The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon The Glass King Outside History I Object Lessons The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me The Rooms of Other Women Poets Object Lessons On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon The Game The Shadow Doll The River Mountain Time The Latin Lesson Bright-Cut Irish Silver We Were Neutral in the War II Outside History: A sequence I The Achill Woman II A False Spring III The Making of an Irish Goddess IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God VI The Photograph on My Father's Desk VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History VIII An Old Steel Engraving IX In Exile X We Are Always Too Late XI What We Lost XII Outside History III Distances The Nights of Childhood The Carousel in the Park Contingencies Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet Our Origins Are in the Sea Midnight Flowers Doorstep Kisses A Different Light Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room Ghost Stories What Love Intended Distances In a Time of Violence 1994 The Singers I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence 1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited 2 The Death of Reason 3 March 1 1847. By the First Post 4 In a Bad Light 5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin 6 Inscriptions 7 Beautiful Speech II Legends This Moment Love The Pomegranate At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town The Water-Clock Moths A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City The Parcel Lava Cameo The Source Legends III Anna Liffey Anna Liffey Story Time and Violence The Art of Grief A Woman Painted on a Leaf The Lost Land 1998 I Colony 1 My Country in Darkness 2 The Harbour 3 Witness 4 Daughters of Colony 5 Imago 6 The Scar 7 City of Shadows 8 Unheroic 9 The Colonists 10 A Dream of Colony 11 A Habitable Grief 12 The Mother Tongue II The Lost Land Home The Lost Land Mother Ireland The Blossom Daughter Ceres Looks at the Morning Tree of Life Escape Dublin, 1959 Watching Old Movies When They Were New Heroic Happiness The Last Discipline The Proof that Plato Was Wrong The Necessity for Irony Formal Feeling Whose? Code 2001 I Marriage I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission II Against Love Poetry III The Pinhole Camera IV Quarantine V Embers VI Then VII First Year VIII Once IX Thank�d be Fortune X A Marriage for the Millennium XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary II Code Limits Code Making Money Exile! Exile! Once in Dublin How We Made a New Art on Old Ground Emigrant Letters The Burdens of a History Horace Odes: II:XI Echo Hide this Place from Angels Limits 2 How the Earth and All the Planets Were Created A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago Is It Still the Same Suburban Woman: Another Detail Irish Poetry Index of First Lines Index of Titles Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She has taught at Trinity College, University College and Bowdoin College Dublin, and at the University of Iowa. She is currently Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, ... read more Praise for Eavan Boland Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. - *Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011* Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. - *Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011* Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. - *Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011* 'Over eight collections, her developing forms and subjects - the fabric of domestic life, myth, love, history and Irish rural landscape - have kept their commitment to lyrical grace and feminism.' Ruth Padel, The Independent on Sunday, January 2000. 'A skilled and celebrated poet.' Ken Gladdish, Poetry Quarterly Review, Autumn 1999. 'Eavan Boland's critical status has burgeoned in the last ten years to the point where she is now one of the major figures in contemporary Irish and women's poetry.' The North magazine. 'This subtle, unadorned book is typical of Boland's powerfully persuasive manner as a poet.' Michael Glover, The Independent on Sunday, October 1998. 'The internationally acclaimed Irish poet powerfully and movingly continues to merge private and mythic history.' W.W. Norton books. 'She's a poet of both painterly and worldly engagements, equally attentive to the dance of the intellect and the testimony of the senses.' The Boston Review. 'Thoughtful, spare and elgant verse from one of Ireland's most significant poets.' Margaret Greenwood, The Rough Guide to Ireland. 'A modern romantic with impressive intellectual resources, Boland fulfils her desire to "bless the ordinary...sanctify the common." Her poems have a rare artistic resonance.' Alan Bold, The Scotsman, 1987. 'She has the equipment of the true poet, that is to say an image-making faculty, a true devoted eye and an ear for rhythm.' Iain Crichton Smith, Chapman magazine, 1989. 'Boland's gift is that she is always accessible, never elitist, but intelligent, striving and inclusive.' Sue Hubbard, New Statesman and Society, 1996. 'The wealth of Eavan Boland's language is complemented by a visual wealth in metaphors.' Anthony Libby, the New York Times, 1987. 'More than twenty years ago her voice was sweet and low and musical...now it has deepened in resonance and authority.' Brian Kennelly, The Irish Times, 1986. Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review Volume 96:3 Autumn 2006 �Swept, Emptied, Kept Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century. read more John Greening, Times Literary Supplement , 27th October 2006. read more Anne Fogarty, The Irish Book Review , Volume I Number III Winter 2005: Books of collected poems fulfil several competing purposes. read more Thomas McCarthy, The Irish Times , 4th February, 2006: Surviving the swans Evan Boland's latest collection illustrates how she managed to escape from the grip of tradition Reading Eavan Boland's powerful oeuvre in the New Collected Poems , one is immediately struck by the idea that persistent moral courage is a powerful technical advantage in a poet's work. read more John Redmond, The Guardian , Saturday 18th February 2006 In the heaven of lost futures John Redmond admires Eavan Boland's forlorn, regretful collection. read more You might also be interested in: Hands Moya Cannon Incorrigibly Plural Edited by Fran Brearton and Edna Longley	Share this... 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