Members Get 10% Off and Earn Rewards Find Out More

A Woman without a Country

Add to Wishlist

A Woman without a Country

Paperback(Reprint)

$16.95

View All Available Formats & Editions

Paperback(Reprint)
$16.95

View All Available Formats & Editions

SHIP THIS ITEM

Qualifies for Free Shipping
PICK UP IN STORE
Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Available within 2 business hours

Want it Today?
Check Store Availability

Related collections and offers

Overview

A powerful work that examines how—even without country or settled identity—a legacy of love can endure.

Eavan Boland is considered “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” by Poetry Review. This stunning new collection, A Woman Without a Country, looks at how we construct one another and how nationhood and history can weave through, reflect, and define the life of an individual. Themes of mother, daughter, and generation echo throughout these extraordinary poems, as they examine how—even without country or settled identity—a legacy of love can endure.

From “Talking to my Daughter Late at Night”

We have a tray, a pot of tea, a scone.
This is the hour
When one thing pours itself into another:
The gable of our house stored in shadow.
A spring planet bending ice
Into an absolute of light.
Your childhood ended years ago. There is
No path back to it.

Product Details
About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352948
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	338,630
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Eavan Boland (1944—2020) was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Outside History and several volumes of nonfiction, and was coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, among other honors. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and Stanford University, where she was the director of the creative writing program.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

"Eavan Boland is a major Irish poet, a great seeker, and her new book is a determined mission to bring the past out of the shadows, to lift up images, record words, in a lyric battle against omissions and erasures, recorded history, the ruthlessness of time. She is a necessary singer."

Edward Hirsch

"Eavan Boland’s poems have an edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history. Her heart-stopping memories—bitter or poignant or loving—become our own. This is her best book—an astonishment, a treasure."

J. D. McClatchy

10/20/2014
“What do we grieve for/ when we leave a country?” inquires Boland (Domestic Violence), the Irish poet, anthologist, and Stanford professor, as she follows the lives of her mother and grandmother through the central lyric sequence in this compact eighth collection. Those lives raise once again the questions that have occupied Boland’s career: what does it mean to be an Irish woman artist, leaving and then returning to “a place, or so it seemed,/ Where every inch of ground/ Was a new fever or a field soaked/ To its grassy roots with remembered hatreds?” Boland’s free verse can pause to focus on single images, and on single resonant terms: “elver,” an eel and a color, and a word “for how/ the bay shelves cirrus clouds/ piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea.” She also takes time to relish ancient authors, such as Ovid, who “made the funeral smoke from the mercenary grave/ Spiral up to become a flight of birds.” Her powers may not be gainsaid, yet it may be hard for any but Boland’s committed fans to find her breaking new ground; a confirmation rather than a discovery, these earnest poems show what it takes to make “a hymn/ to the durable and daily implement, the stored/ possibility of another day.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Masterful… I felt, reading A Woman Without a Country, that I was having a conversation—that beautiful kind of conversation where you can't nod enthusiastically enough, where each speaker articulates the other's thoughts as quickly as they occur, where you feel energized and elated and full of new understanding of each other and the world."

NPR books blog - Amal El-Mohtar

★ 10/01/2014
In her latest collection, Boland (A Journey with Two Maps) shows a mastery of subject and language with well-crafted poems that give a feel for both the expanse of Irish history and the intimacy of the domestic: marriage, children, and the garden in summer light. Boland starts dynamically with a poem called "The Lost Art of Letter Writing," where she says, "The paper was so thin it skinned air.// The hand was fire and the page tinder." One of her strengths is a painterly eye ("the way the surface waited all day/ to be a silvery pause between sky and city"), and she captures evocatively and often the northern light of her native Ireland: "Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?/ Frost was an iron, underhand descent./ Dusk was always in session." The strongest section is the title sequence, which addresses inheritance and family, particularly Boland's grandmother and mother, as in these lines about her mother's marriage: "Icy promises rose beside a crosshatch of ocean and horizon." There's also a deep sense of history: its wars, its tragedies, the common bonds of a people long under the yoke of another power. VERDICT A superb collection not to be missed, full of exquisite language, music, knowledge and emotion.—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews