A poet's Dublin

Eavan Boland

Book - 2016

"Written over years, the transcendent and moving poems in A Poet?s Dublin seek out shadows and impressions of a powerful, historic city, studying how it forms and alters language, memory, and selfhood. The poems range from an evocation of the neighborhoods under the hills where the poet lived and raised her children to the inner-city bombing of 1974, and include such signature poems as "The Pomegranate," "The War Horse," and "Anna Liffey." Above all, these poems weave together the story of a self and a city?private, political, and bound by history. The poems are supported by photographs of the city at all times and in all seasons: from dawn on the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, to twilight up in... the Dublin foothills. 45 photographs."--

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Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Published
New York : W. W. Norton & Company 2016.
Language
English
Main Author
Eavan Boland (author)
Edition
First American edition
Physical Description
xv, 158 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780393285369
  • Introduction
  • I. City of Shadows
  • 'As Dusk Fell on the City'
  • Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet
  • Once in Dublin
  • Unheroic
  • The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City
  • City of Shadows
  • A False Spring
  • Tree of Life
  • Nationhood: Two Failed Sonnets
  • The Dolls Museum in Dublin
  • An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears
  • We were Neutral in the War
  • Heroic
  • Child of Our Time
  • Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland
  • II. Gifts of the River
  • 'I Begin with the Liffey ...'
  • The Scar
  • Anna Liffey
  • How the Dance Came to the City
  • The Harbour
  • The Long Evenings of their Leave-Takings
  • And Soul
  • The Proof That Plato Was Wrong
  • Escape
  • Cityscape
  • III. Under these Hills
  • 'Dundrum is an Anglicisation of a Gaelic Place Name...'
  • The War Horse
  • This Moment
  • Night Feed
  • The Pomegranate
  • The Mother Tongue
  • Witness
  • In Our Own Country
  • Making Money
  • What Love Intended
  • Once
  • A Marriage for the Millennium
  • Re-Reading Oliver Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' in a Changed Ireland
  • Two Poets and a City: A Conversation, Eavan Boland and Paula Merhan
  • Notes on the Photographs
  • Index
Review by Library Journal Review

The chill and grit of Dublin eddy through this collection of poems by one of Ireland's most beloved poets, whose observations of everyday life in the "cast iron and adamant" Irish capital will make residents look at their city anew and all others feel they are walking the city's streets. The poems were selected by Paula Meehan (Dharmakaya) and Jody Allen Randolph (Eavan Boland) to create "a topography of the city with the poet in particular places at different ages and phases of her life." The poems also explore home and inner lives that are born of place and resonate with Dublin details: the white pepper, the history that is a daily presence: "The patriot was made of drenched stone./ His lips were still speaking./ The gun/ he held had just killed someone." The pieces are accompanied by Boland's black-and-white photographs of Dublin; some depict a place or thing mentioned in the poem they complement, while others are antagonistic or merely evocative of the city. The title closes with a conversation between Meehan, herself an urban poet, and Boland. VERDICT Essential for Irish studies collections and the poetry shelves of larger public libraries.-Henrietta Verma, National -Information Standards Organization, Baltimore © Copyright 2016. 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.