Anne Fogarty, The Irish Book Review, Volume I Number III Winter 2005:

Books of collected poems fulfil several competing purposes. They consolidate artistic achievement by creating a sense of overview and neat chronological progression. But they also defamiliarise. The individual volumes of a poet's work seem more porous and unstable when they sit alongside each other in an anthology

It is ten years since Eavan Boland published her initial Collected Poems. This new volume adds one hundred pages to the previous work. Such amplitude results not just from the addition of her two recent books, The Lost Land and Code, but also from the inclusion of almost all of her early poems along with an excerpt from an unpublished verse play, Femininity and Freedom. As a result, this extended collection provides tantalising insights into the beginnings of Boland's career in the early 1960s, while also allowing the reader to juxtapose and interleave poems from several decades.

The assurance of her startling poetic debut, New Territory, in 1967 is merely enhanced by the new-found glimpse into preceding work that appeared in a chapbook in 1962. moreover, the sudden shift to suburban themes in her second collection, The War Horse, is now bridged by the Yeatsian experiment of a verse drama focusing on the figure of Deidre. Symbolically, in this new view of Boland's progress as a poet, the legendary figure of a woman in Irish myth cedes to the discovery of a female perspective on experience, with its concentration on the concrete details of modern suburban life.

Boland's abiding concern with the necessity to renegotiate literary tradition is also brought more sharply into focus by this collection. Dialogues with other poets, including Michael Longley, Eamonn Grennan and Derek Mahon, punctuate her first collection, while an elegy for Michael Hartnett closes her most recent volume. These colloquies permit an insistent questioning of the boundaries of literary tradition and of the function and reach of poetry. Such iconoclasm leads, paradoxically, in all of Boland's work to a quest for the illuminating properties of a poetic vision once it has been shorn of its false pretensions. The lament for Hartnett avers that there 'was no Orpheus in Ireland.'

Nonetheless, it ends with the discovery of music in a remembered noise, the "sound / of a bird's wing", from a lost language. Although the moment of revelation is determinedly withheld, it is also precisely realised.

The elongated perspectives of this new survey of Boland's work also reveal her capacity to revisit the distinctive preoccupations that she has staked out as the preserve of her oeuvre from the very beginning. A recent poem, 'Suburban Woman: Another Detail', returns to the symbolic, of-centre locus of the suburb and constructs a less anxious but more angular view of the woman with a child in an isolated domestic space. Similarly, 'The Lost Land' interfuses with perspectives of earlier poems about the bonds between mothers and daughters and the problem of recovering the past and deconstructs the talismanic words that underlay them: "Ireland. Absence. Daughter." 'Escape' wittily uses the present-day scene of a swan nesting near Leeson Street Bridge to exorcise a youthful fascination with the poetic resonance of the story of the Children of Lir.

Boland's recent volumes have become increasingly spare and honed. They continue, however, her quest for what she dubs 'a formal feeling', the patterns made feasible by the architectonics of poetic language. The abstract play of light and shadow and of isolated words takes precedence over large-scale attempts to establish grandiose truths.

If a new mood and tone pervade her publications in the last decade, their commitment to the retrieval of occluded histories continues unabated as does their revisionary force. Her quizzical anti-love poems, written to mark her thirtieth wedding anniversary, unfurl a moving account of the mutations of married love. Equally, her works remains loyal to its concern with excavating a plethora of forgotten lives, whether of her parents in holiday in Connemara or of anonymous Irish emigrants making the journey to America.

New Collected Poems is a rich and welcome compendium. It acts as a timely reminder of the significance and innovatory force of Boland's achievement as a poet and of the degree to which so many of her texts such as 'Night Feed', 'The Pomegranate' and 'That the Science of Cartography is Limited' have lastingly altered the contours of Irish writing. Modern Irish poetry would be unthinkable without her presence. New Collected Poems valuably updates the record of Eavan Boland's artistic output. More vitally, it underscores the vibrancy of her ongoing project as a poet who is doubtless one of the foremost writers in contemporary Ireland.