Eavan Boland

"Drawing on sources such as the land, the Church, the past, changing politics, and literary styles, Irish writers ranging from W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Augusta Gregory to Roddy Doyle, Kate O'Brien, Colm Toibin, John Banville, and Seamus Heaney explore what it means to be a writer in Ireland"--Provided by publisher.

A new collection of poems about marriage by one of our most celebrated poets. These powerful poems are written against the perfections and idealizations of traditional love poetry. The man and woman in these poems are husband and wife, custodians of ordinary, aging human love. They are not figures in a love poem. Time is their essential witness, and not their destroyer.

Here, from one of our major poets, is the collected early work that has been long unavailable in this country. Included in this volume is the work from Eaven Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey. With the publication of this volume, all of Boland's poetry will now be available.

The publication of Eavan Boland's Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, established Boland as a significant presence in the contemporary poetry world. This, her seventh volume, continues to mine what she has termed "the meeting place between womanhood and history.". Of this collection she has written: "These poems try to take the gap between rhetoric and reality and study the corruptions and griefs which happen in that space. These are poems about Ireland, about the body, about growing older in both and using each as a text for the other. The time of violence in the title happens in the present and in the past. It happens in the soul and the event. It is that demanding state of process where things are revealed about womanhood and identity which lead on to an investigation - in the title sequence - of the poignant and dangerous mischances between expression and experience.". Eavan Boland's important gift is her ability to traverse both the private and the public worlds that women inhabit. R. T. Smith in the Southern Humanities Review said of her work: "In her relentless excavation of the local events and moments that bear witness to women's legitimate place in history and the interpretative community, Eavan Boland has for a decade brought to light the nature of myths that women have been relegated to." She is a poet of universal depth and authority.

In the words of its editors, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form." Here, two of our foremost poets provide a lucid, straightforward anthology for those who have always felt that an understanding of form -- sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, etc. -- would enhance their appreciation of poetry. By example and explanation, the anthology traces "the exuberant history of forms," a history that unites poets as manifold as John Keats and Joy Harjo (the Ode) or Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Toomer (the Stanza). Each chapter is devoted to one form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of exemplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of the form. In the end, Strand and Boland write, "we hope that the reader will agree that these forms are -- as we believe -- not locks, but keys." In linking the expressive potential of a poem to its architecture of syllable and rhyme, this collection is as instructive for the novice as it is inspiring for the practiced poet. - Jacket flap.

"A forceful and moving new volume from "one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century" (Poetry Review). Acclaimed poet Eavan Boland has been praised for her "edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history" (J.D. McClatchy)-all on display in The Historians. Here Boland returns to her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased, stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past. Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. These narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history"--