Quote of the Day
Congratulations to Carcanet for paying equal attention to new poets and to modern classics. The Collected H.D., Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and Yvor Winters are all essential books, and Carcanet is doing a public service keeping them in print.
Thom Gunn
|
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
Review of The Lost Land - Ken Gladdish, Poetry Quarterly Review, Issue 14: Autumn 1999
Ken Gladdish, Poetry Quarterly Review, Issue 14: Autumn 1999
Previous review of 'The Lost Land'...
Next review of 'The Lost Land'...
To the 'The Lost Land' page...
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'). |
|
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
|
This website ©2000-2013 Carcanet Press Ltd
|
|