Review by Booklist Review
It is odd to think of Boland, one of Ireland's greatest poets, who employed Irish legend and history as richly as anyone after Yeats and continues to do so, as many titles herein confirm: An Irish Georgic, An Island of Daughters, Edge of Empire as a woman without a country. She has always been a poet of women's experience, too, however, and the experience of a particular woman, a grandmother who died at 31 in 1909, constitutes the heart of the heart of this collection, a sequence that bears its title. She and other women like her lost their country through a series of questions to which they could find no answer; surely, also, the reader must think, because the bird in her blackwork (embroidery) warned her, not a word not a word / not a word not a word, and she took the instructions of the photographer of her Studio Portrait 1897 to heart: Keep still quite still not move not stir not once. Few other poets pierce so deeply into their subjects.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. 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 (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
