Norton paperback

xvii, 369 p. ; 21 cm

Jacques Lacan's critique of Sigmund Freud's ego psychology.

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.

On February 10, 1991, Elliot Gilbert, a sixty-year-old professor of English, checked into a major medical center for routine prostate surgery. Twenty-four hours later, he was pronounced dead in the recovery room. To this day, no one from the hospital has told his family how or why he died. In Wrongful Death his widow has produced a searingly frank account of one family's experience with a kind of medical disaster that occurs surprisingly often but is all-too-rarely discussed in a political arena dominated by concerns about the escalating costs of malpractice insurance. As her story unfolds, Sandra Gilbert describes the numbing shock into which she and her children were plunged by her husband's inexplicable death as well as the stages of grief they endured as they struggled to come to terms with their loss. But her major focus is on the process of discovery through which, with the help of friends and lawyers, they began to learn something about what had happened to Elliot. What are the implications of such a medical tragedy for the deceased and for his survivors? How does it feel to confront the possibility that a loved one has suffered what the law calls a "wrongful death"? As she examines the bewildering complexity of the legal, social, and medical questions surrounding "adverse events" like the one that killed her husband, Gilbert shows how vulnerable we all are to the power of the health-care establishment.

A haunting semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman from the Caribbean adrift in England.