Ken Gladdish, Poetry Quarterly Review, Issue 14: Autumn 1999

A skilled and celebrated poet, Eavan Boland has followed her Collected Poems with this volume, whose subject is larely Ireland and its tragic past. These days, in the Republic at least, since the bonanza of EU membership, patriotic grief is not as easy to distil as before. Also it can distance the reader who might not share the pain and the evident anger:

A harp and a wolfhound on an ashtray.
All my childhood
I took you for the truth.
I see you now for what you are
The way to make pain a souvenir.
(from 'Imago')

But, a professional, she can conjure a poem out of her father buttoning his coat as in 'City of Shadow'. So one turns gratefully to the handful of verses which give Hibernian ghosts a rest, and speak for example of a daughter growing up:

I turned around.
I turned around.
She was gone.
Grown. No longer ready
to come with me, whenever
a dry Sunday
held out its promises.
(from 'The Necessity for Irony').