In a Time of Violence - Softcover

Boland, Eavan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857540670 ISBN 13: 9781857540673

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

Building on the explorations and discoveries initiated in A Journey and pursued in Outside History, the author brings her poems up more immediately than ever against the social and political realities of her Ireland. This book is a Poetry Book Society Choice.

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 Publishers Weekly

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857540670
• ISBN 13: 9781857540673
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64