In a Time of Violence - Hardcover

Boland, Eavan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393036170 ISBN 13: 9780393036176

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1994

Synopsis

A collection of poetry about Ireland, the body, and growing older features the violence of each, how they relate, and how they affect the identity of the self as a woman. By the author of Outside History.

About this title

Reviews

Boland follows her previous collection, Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990 , by moving inside it with poems that plumb her individual history and that of Ireland. Arranged in three sections, the poetry describes an arc. The first poems capture moments rooted in the last century and, with their chronological distance, can seem remote. More immediate in tone and domestic in context are poems in the second section, where Boland seeks continuity in recollections of her childhood and experiences with her daughters: "My hair was once like yours. / And the world / is less bitter to me / because you will retell the story" ("Legends"). In the last poems, Boland examines her often conflicting perceptions of herself as woman and poet, observing in the long and well-sustained "Anna Liffey" that "it will not matter / That I was a woman . . . / In the end / everything that burdened and distinguished me / will be lost in this: / I was a voice." In the best work here, exhibiting Boland's characteristic directness of syntax and emotion, the poet persuasively claims a place in a history, whether it is her country's, her family's or her own as a poet.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Irish poet Boland frequently employs the simplest of phrases to get her ideas across ("One tree is black./ One window is yellow as butter"), and her poems offer a certain intimacy and refinement, like the curio showing a woman painted on a leaf that serves as the subject of one poem. But the poems as a whole have a certain grandeur, a sense of bold timelessness, the pleasure of someone speaking directly to you. Boland is concerned with the myths that shape us, and she ferrets them out by coming at her subject at an angle: the forest whose road was built by "famine workers"; the Irish seamstresses fashioning beautiful garments as their "coffin ships"; the dolls with their "terrible stares," signifying not playtime but a time we can no longer imagine; the myth of Persephone used to understand how we let go of our children. An ambitious cycle that opens the book limns the violence beneath the calmest surfaces: "waiting under/ beautiful speech. To strike." This is fine writing that, indeed, has the power of myth and the power to do violence to our jaded expectations. Highly recommended.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

We can call Boland Ireland's premier woman poet, but that does not do her justice. She is one of Ireland's finest contemporary writers, as passionate and ambitious as Kennelly, as classical and meticulous as Heaney. What is most astonishing about her work is its continued growth and expansion. The Journey (1987) showed her to be a feminist Dante; Outside History (1990), an Irish Adrienne Rich. In this book, Boland continues to explore the connections between nation and body. As an Irishwoman, she amply recognizes the process of colonization; as a woman of middle years, she knows the body's memories and its snares. In a masterly deconstruction of her own work, Boland revisits the "famine roads" of her early poetry to explore memory, politics, the erasure of truths. In America, time and space shift treacherously as the poet recalls her personal and ethnic pasts. This is profound, moving work from a poet at the height of her powers. Pat Monaghan

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393036170
• ISBN 13: 9780393036176
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 70