Carcanet Press - New Collected Poems

Description
Excerpt
Author
Contents
Awards
Reviews

O swan by swan my heart goes down
Through Dublin town, through Dublin town.

from 'Liffeytown', 1962

Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). It also fills out the early record, reproducing two key poems from 23 Poems (1962), New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975) and her later books; it includes passages from her unpublished 1971 play Femininity and Freedom. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous.

Her writing and example are vitally enabling for young writers and readers; she traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement and patient experimentation with form, theme and language.

Author's Note

from 23 Poems, 1962
Liffeytown
The Liffey beyond Islandbridge

New Territory, 1967
The Poets
The Gryphons
The Pilgrim
New Territory
Mirages
Migration
The Dream of Lir's Son
Malediction
Lullaby
Belfast vs Dublin
Requiem for a Personal Friend
A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol
From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin
Shakespeare
The Comic Shakespeare
Yeats in Civil War
The Flight of the Earls
After the Irish of Egan O'Rahilly
The King and the Troubadour
Athene's Song
The Winning of Etain

from 'Femininity and Freedom', 1971
'Deidre and Cathal in conversation'

The War Horse, 1975
The Other Woman
The War Horse
Child of Our Time
A Soldier's Son
The Famine Road
Cyclist with Cut Branches
Song
The Botanic Gardens
Prisoners
Ready for Flight
Sisters
The Laws of Love
The Family Tree
Naoise at Four
Anon
From the Irish of Pangur Ban
Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan
O Fons Bandusiae
Dependence Day
Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes
The Atlantic Ocean
Chorus of the Shadows
The Greek Experience
Suburban Woman
Ode to Suburbia
The Hanging Judge

In Her Own Image, 1980
Tirade for the Mimic Muse
In Her Own Image
In His Own Image
Anorexic
Mastectomy
Solitary
Menses
Witching
Exhibitionist
Making Up

Night Feed, 1980
Domestic Interior
Night Feed
Before Spring
Energies
Hymn
Partings
Endings
Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray
Lights
After a Childhood Away from Ireland
Monotony
The Muse Mother
A Ballad of Home
Patchwork or the Poet's Craft
In the Garden
Degas's Laundresses
Woman in Kitchen
Woman Posing
It's a Woman's World
Tirade for the Epic Muse
The New Pastoral
On Renoir's The Grape Pickers
'Daphne with her thighs in bark'
The Woman Changes Her Skin
The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish
The Woman in the Fur Shop
The Woman as Mummy's Head
A Ballad of Beauty and Time

The Journey, 1987
I
I Remember
Mise Eire
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening
The Oral Tradition
Fever
The Unlived Life
Lace
The Bottle Garden
Suburban Woman: A Detail
The Briar Rose
The Women
Nocturne
The Fire in Our Neighbourhood
On Holiday
Growing Up
There and Back
The Wild Spray
II
The Journey
Envoi
III
Listen. This is the Noise of Myth
An Irish Childhood in England:1951
Fond Memory
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland
The Emigrant Irish
Tirade for the Lyric Muse
The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon
The Glass King

Outside History, 1990
I Object Lessons
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
The Rooms of Other Women Poets
Object Lessons
On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon
The Game
The Shadow Doll
The River
Mountain Time
The Latin Lesson
Bright-Cut Irish Silver
We Were Neutral in the War
II Outside History: A sequence
I The Achill Woman
II A False Spring
III The Making of an Irish Goddess
IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland
V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God
VI The Photograph on My Father's Desk
VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History
VIII An Old Steel Engraving
IX In Exile
X We Are Always Too Late
XI What We Lost
XII Outside History
III Distances
The Nights of Childhood
The Carousel in the Park
Contingencies
Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet
Our Origins Are in the Sea
Midnight Flowers
Doorstep Kisses
A Different Light
Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room
Ghost Stories
What Love Intended
Distances

In a Time of Violence, 1994
The Singers
I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence
1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited
2 The Death of Reason
3 March 1 1847. By the First Post
4 In a Bad Light
5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin
6 Inscriptions
7 Beautiful Speech
II Legends
This Moment
Love
The Pomegranate
At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town
The Water-Clock
Moths
A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs
In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own
The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City
The Parcel
Lava Cameo
The Source
Legends
III Anna Liffey
Anna Liffey
Story
Time and Violence
The Art of Grief
A Woman Painted on a Leaf

The Lost Land, 1998
I Colony
1 My Country in Darkness
2 The Harbour
3 Witness
4 Daughters of Colony
5 Imago
6 The Scar
7 City of Shadows
8 Unheroic
9 The Colonists
10 A Dream of Colony
11 A Habitable Grief
12 The Mother Tongue
II The Lost Land
Home
The Lost Land
Mother Ireland
The Blossom
Daughter
Ceres Looks at the Morning
Tree of Life
Escape
Dublin, 1959
Watching Old Movies When They Were New
Heroic
Happiness
The Last Discipline
The Proof that Plato Was Wrong
The Necessity for Irony
Formal Feeling
Whose?

Code, 2001
I Marriage
I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission
II Against Love Poetry
III The Pinhole Camera
IV Quarantine
V Embers
VI Then
VII First Year
VIII Once
IX Thankëd be Fortune
X A Marriage for the Millennium
XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary
II Code
Limits
Code
Making Money
Exile! Exile!
Once in Dublin
How We Made a New Art on Old Ground
Emigrant Letters
The Burdens of a History
Horace Odes: II:XI
Echo
Hide this Place from Angels
Limits 2
How the Earth and All the Planets Were Created
A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago
Is It Still the Same
Suburban Woman: Another Detail
Irish Poetry

Index of First Lines
Index of Titles

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College in Maine, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. ... read more

Awards won by Eavan Boland Winner, 2020 Costa Poetry Award
(The Historians) Winner, 2017 Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award

Praise for Eavan Boland 'having such valuable essays collected in a single volume, especially for a younger generation that may not have experienced, first-hand, the electric charge that Object Lessons applied to the Irish poetry world, is a boon.'
Vona Groarke, The Irish Times
'[Citizen Poet] is wide-ranging, thrillingly combative, and evidence of an ambitious commitment to broadening poetry's scope of possibility -- and, in doing so, remaking its past. ... If poetry, especially Irish poetry, has become less lonely than it was when Boland first encountered it, that's thanks in no small part to her lifelong work.'
Declan Ryan, The Telegraph
'Eavan Boland's essays are the work of an ever-generous, insightful and knowing cartographer. No one articulates the complexities, challenges and nuances of being an Irish female poet like she does in these original, arresting and trailblazing essays. Citizen Poet is a must-read for anyone interested in poetry, identity and the responsibilities of the artist.'
Victoria Kennefick 'Boland's essays remind us [...] of the change she helped bring about, which is nothing less than the redefinition and expansion of what Irish poetry â what any poetry â can be.'
Heather Clark

'...She has a dazzling gift for marrying the poem's narrative to its underlying considerations and themes, her carefully enacted restraint heightening the impact of the frequently stunning closing image.'

Maya C. Popa, Poetry Review

'The poems, all of them, have that familiar, spare, feel to them - the clarity of cold water, the measured cadence, the plain diction and the leaping insight so characteristic of her mature work - but there is grief here of a depth and of a kind that chills the heart... against the darkness that eddies and gathers in this, the last book we will have from her hand, there is indeed redemptive light'

Theo Dorgan, Dublin Review of Books

'This is a fitting tribute to a poet whose work has revised history as we know it and whose talent will be much missed.'

Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin

'The first poem in Boland's book, The Fire Gilder, is one of the best Irish poems of the past half-century.'

Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times

'Truly consumable, enjoyable and emotive... all the things that great poetry should be.'

Jasmine Reads, YouTube

'[The Historians] zooms in with characteristic musicality and intelligence on what the stories that are often overlooked - those of women'

Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Poetry Books of the Year 2020

'It is, as came to be expected from Boland, filled with stories of ordinary Irish women, sensitively rendered in her understated verse. In revisiting the otherwise erased experiences of her subjects, Boland asks us to reconfigure our own understanding of the past, though she acknowledges the difficulties of that, too'
The New Statesman
'There's a poignancy here that is hard to avoid... This modest collection is welcome and those who have not read Boland - few though they may be - will find here at least an introduction to her always-potent art. For others, it will serve as a coda to a poetic life well lived.'
Books Ireland Magazine
'It feels, reading it in the wake of her death, to be unsettlingly prophetic, a fitting close to the life's work of a great poet'
Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times
'... a rich, unsettling moral adventure in memory and responsibility.'
Theo Dorgan
Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others.
Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011

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New Collected Poems Eavan Boland 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, Irish, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jul 2012) 9781847779618 £14.95 £13.45 Paperback (280 pages) (Pub. Nov 2005) 9781857548587 £19.95 £17.95 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Excerpt Author Contents Awards Reviews O swan by swan my heart goes down Through Dublin town, through Dublin town. from 'Liffeytown', 1962 Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). It also fills out the early record, reproducing two key poems from 23 Poems (1962), New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975) and her later books; it includes passages from her unpublished 1971 play Femininity and Freedom. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Her writing and example are vitally enabling for young writers and readers; she traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement and patient experimentation with form, theme and language. Author's Note *from 23 Poems, 1962* Liffeytown The Liffey beyond Islandbridge New Territory, 1967 The Poets The Gryphons The Pilgrim New Territory Mirages Migration The Dream of Lir's Son Malediction Lullaby Belfast vs Dublin Requiem for a Personal Friend A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin Shakespeare The Comic Shakespeare Yeats in Civil War The Flight of the Earls After the Irish of Egan O'Rahilly The King and the Troubadour Athene's Song The Winning of Etain from 'Femininity and Freedom', 1971 'Deidre and Cathal in conversation' The War Horse, 1975 The Other Woman The War Horse Child of Our Time A Soldier's Son The Famine Road Cyclist with Cut Branches Song The Botanic Gardens Prisoners Ready for Flight Sisters The Laws of Love The Family Tree Naoise at Four Anon From the Irish of Pangur Ban Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan O Fons Bandusiae Dependence Day Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes The Atlantic Ocean Chorus of the Shadows The Greek Experience Suburban Woman Ode to Suburbia The Hanging Judge In Her Own Image, 1980 Tirade for the Mimic Muse In Her Own Image In His Own Image Anorexic Mastectomy Solitary Menses Witching Exhibitionist Making Up Night Feed, 1980 Domestic Interior Night Feed Before Spring Energies Hymn Partings Endings Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray Lights After a Childhood Away from Ireland Monotony The Muse Mother A Ballad of Home Patchwork or the Poet's Craft In the Garden Degas's Laundresses Woman in Kitchen Woman Posing It's a Woman's World Tirade for the Epic Muse The New Pastoral On Renoir's The Grape Pickers 'Daphne with her thighs in bark' The Woman Changes Her Skin The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish The Woman in the Fur Shop The Woman as Mummy's Head A Ballad of Beauty and Time The Journey, 1987 I I Remember Mise Eire Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening The Oral Tradition Fever The Unlived Life Lace The Bottle Garden Suburban Woman: A Detail The Briar Rose The Women Nocturne The Fire in Our Neighbourhood On Holiday Growing Up There and Back The Wild Spray II The Journey Envoi III Listen. This is the Noise of Myth An Irish Childhood in England:1951 Fond Memory Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland The Emigrant Irish Tirade for the Lyric Muse The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon The Glass King *Outside History, 1990 I Object Lessons The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me The Rooms of Other Women Poets Object Lessons On the Gift of The Birds of America* by John James Audubon The Game The Shadow Doll The River Mountain Time The Latin Lesson Bright-Cut Irish Silver We Were Neutral in the War II Outside History: A sequence I The Achill Woman II A False Spring III The Making of an Irish Goddess IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God VI The Photograph on My Father's Desk VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History VIII An Old Steel Engraving IX In Exile X We Are Always Too Late XI What We Lost XII Outside History III Distances The Nights of Childhood The Carousel in the Park Contingencies Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet Our Origins Are in the Sea Midnight Flowers Doorstep Kisses A Different Light Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room Ghost Stories What Love Intended Distances In a Time of Violence, 1994 The Singers I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence 1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited 2 The Death of Reason 3 March 1 1847. By the First Post 4 In a Bad Light 5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin 6 Inscriptions 7 Beautiful Speech II Legends This Moment Love The Pomegranate At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town The Water-Clock Moths A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City The Parcel Lava Cameo The Source Legends III Anna Liffey Anna Liffey Story Time and Violence The Art of Grief A Woman Painted on a Leaf The Lost Land, 1998 I Colony 1 My Country in Darkness 2 The Harbour 3 Witness 4 Daughters of Colony 5 Imago 6 The Scar 7 City of Shadows 8 Unheroic 9 The Colonists 10 A Dream of Colony 11 A Habitable Grief 12 The Mother Tongue II The Lost Land Home The Lost Land Mother Ireland The Blossom Daughter Ceres Looks at the Morning Tree of Life Escape Dublin, 1959 Watching Old Movies When They Were New Heroic Happiness The Last Discipline The Proof that Plato Was Wrong The Necessity for Irony Formal Feeling Whose? Code, 2001 I Marriage I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission II Against Love Poetry III The Pinhole Camera IV Quarantine V Embers VI Then VII First Year VIII Once IX Thankëd be Fortune X A Marriage for the Millennium XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary II Code Limits Code Making Money Exile! Exile! Once in Dublin How We Made a New Art on Old Ground Emigrant Letters The Burdens of a History Horace Odes: II:XI Echo Hide this Place from Angels Limits 2 How the Earth and All the Planets Were Created A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago Is It Still the Same Suburban Woman: Another Detail Irish Poetry Index of First Lines Index of Titles Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College in Maine, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. ... read more Awards won by Eavan Boland Winner, 2020 Costa Poetry Award (The Historians) Winner, 2017 Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award Praise for Eavan Boland 'having such valuable essays collected in a single volume, especially for a younger generation that may not have experienced, first-hand, the electric charge that Object Lessons applied to the Irish poetry world, is a boon.' Vona Groarke, The Irish Times '[Citizen Poet] is wide-ranging, thrillingly combative, and evidence of an ambitious commitment to broadening poetry's scope of possibility -- and, in doing so, remaking its past. ... If poetry, especially Irish poetry, has become less lonely than it was when Boland first encountered it, that's thanks in no small part to her lifelong work.' Declan Ryan, The Telegraph 'Eavan Boland's essays are the work of an ever-generous, insightful and knowing cartographer. No one articulates the complexities, challenges and nuances of being an Irish female poet like she does in these original, arresting and trailblazing essays. Citizen Poet is a must-read for anyone interested in poetry, identity and the responsibilities of the artist.' Victoria Kennefick 'Boland's essays remind us [...] of the change she helped bring about, which is nothing less than the redefinition and expansion of what Irish poetry â what any poetry â can be.' Heather Clark '...She has a dazzling gift for marrying the poem's narrative to its underlying considerations and themes, her carefully enacted restraint heightening the impact of the frequently stunning closing image.' Maya C. Popa, Poetry Review 'The poems, all of them, have that familiar, spare, feel to them - the clarity of cold water, the measured cadence, the plain diction and the leaping insight so characteristic of her mature work - but there is grief here of a depth and of a kind that chills the heart... against the darkness that eddies and gathers in this, the last book we will have from her hand, there is indeed redemptive light' Theo Dorgan, Dublin Review of Books 'This is a fitting tribute to a poet whose work has revised history as we know it and whose talent will be much missed.' Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin 'The first poem in Boland's book, The Fire Gilder, is one of the best Irish poems of the past half-century.' Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times 'Truly consumable, enjoyable and emotive... all the things that great poetry should be.' Jasmine Reads, YouTube '[The Historians] zooms in with characteristic musicality and intelligence on what the stories that are often overlooked - those of women' *Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian* Poetry Books of the Year 2020 'It is, as came to be expected from Boland, filled with stories of ordinary Irish women, sensitively rendered in her understated verse. In revisiting the otherwise erased experiences of her subjects, Boland asks us to reconfigure our own understanding of the past, though she acknowledges the difficulties of that, too' The New Statesman 'There's a poignancy here that is hard to avoid... This modest collection is welcome and those who have not read Boland - few though they may be - will find here at least an introduction to her always-potent art. For others, it will serve as a coda to a poetic life well lived.' Books Ireland Magazine** 'It feels, reading it in the wake of her death, to be unsettlingly prophetic, a fitting close to the life's work of a great poet' Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times '... a rich, unsettling moral adventure in memory and responsibility.' Theo Dorgan Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet contains essays both personal and public written in a tone urgent and wise, with astute observations on her own trajectory as a poet and the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Paula Meehan, among others. *Colm Toibin, The Irish Times, Our Favourite Books of 2011* You might also be interested in: Hands Moya Cannon Incorrigibly Plural Edited by Fran Brearton and Edna Longley	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! 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