A Woman Without a Country: Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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."
