An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 - Softcover

Boland, Eavan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393316017 ISBN 13: 9780393316018

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

"Readers of this work will recognize and relish the way this collection charts a life's course."--Publishers Weekly

Here, from one of our major poets, is the collected early work that has been long unavailable in this country. Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.

The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."

This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

About this title

About the Author:

Eavan Boland is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction. A professor and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, she is the winner of a Lannan Foundation Award. She lives in Stanford, California, and Dublin, Ireland.

From Booklist:

As this selection from her first five books of poems demonstrates, Boland began her career a true daughter of Yeats, drawing on myth and history to illuminate the human condition in formally conservative poems of entrancing intelligence and beauty. Subsequent developments in her personal life--marriage, motherhood, suburban living--then gave her personal experience with the subjects of ordinary women's work and lives. Adding those subjects to her repertoire, she continued to write in regular forms and also, increasingly, in new, looser (unrhymed, not strictly measured) ones. Introducing this book's contents, she writes that as a result of the tensions between literary life and suburban life, "I came to regard each poem . . . as a forceful engagement between a life and a language." Forceful indeed, and evocative, provocative, and powerful, too, are such masterworks as the dazzling and chilling attack on cosmetics, "Tirade for the Mimic Muse" ; the 11-poem sequence on motherhood, "Domestic Interior" ; and Boland's own Dantesque quest, led by the shade of Sappho, for ultimate truth, "The Journey." Many a shorter poem here is as complex, serious, humane, sharp, and ravishingly well crafted as those longer poems. Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393316017
• ISBN 13: 9780393316018
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206