Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). It also fills out the early record, reproducing two key poems from 23 Poems (1962), New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975) and her later books; it includes passages from her unpublished 1971 play Femininity and Freedom. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Her writing and example are vitally enabling for young writers and readers; she traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement and patient experimentation with form, theme and language
Table of Contents Author's Note from 23 Poems 1962 Liffeytown The Liffey beyond Islandbridge New Territory 1967 The Poets The Gryphons The Pilgrim New Territory Mirages Migration The Dream of Lir's Son Malediction Lullaby Belfast vs Dublin Requiem for a Personal Friend A Cynic at Kilmainham Gaol From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin Shakespeare The Comic Shakespeare Yeats in Civil War The Flight of the Earls After the Irish of Egan O'Rahilly The King and the Troubadour Athene's Song The Winning of Etain from 'Femininity and Freedom' 1971 'Deidre and Cathal in conversation' The War Horse 1975 The Other Woman The War Horse Child of Our Time A Soldier's Son The Famine Road Cyclist with Cut Branches Song The Botanic Gardens Prisoners Ready for Flight Sisters The Laws of Love The Family Tree Naoise at Four Anon From the Irish of Pangur Ban Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan O Fons Bandusiae Dependence Day Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes The Atlantic Ocean Chorus of the Shadows The Greek Experience Suburban Woman Ode to Suburbia The Hanging Judge In Her Own Image 1980 Tirade for the Mimic Muse In Her Own Image In His Own Image Anorexic Mastectomy Solitary Menses Witching Exhibitionist Making Up Night Feed 1980 Domestic Interior Night Feed Before Spring Energies Hymn Partings Endings Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray Lights After a Childhood Away from Ireland Monotony The Muse Mother A Ballad of Home Patchwork or the Poet's Craft In the Garden Degas's Laundresses Woman in Kitchen Woman Posing It's a Woman's World Tirade for the Epic Muse The New Pastoral On Renoir's The Grape Pickers 'Daphne with her thighs in bark' The Woman Changes Her Skin The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish The Woman in the Fur Shop The Woman as Mummy's Head A Ballad of Beauty and Time The Journey 1987 I I Remember Mise Eire Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening The Oral Tradition Fever The Unlived Life Lace The Bottle Garden Suburban Woman: A Detail The Briar Rose The Women Nocturne The Fire in Our Neighbourhood On Holiday Growing Up There and Back The Wild Spray II The Journey Envoi III Listen. This is the Noise of Myth An Irish Childhood in England:1951 Fond Memory Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland The Emigrant Irish Tirade for the Lyric Muse The Woman takes her Revenge on the Moon The Glass King Outside History I Object Lessons The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me The Rooms of Other Women Poets Object Lessons On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon The Game The Shadow Doll The River Mountain Time The Latin Lesson Bright-Cut Irish Silver We Were Neutral in the War II Outside History: A sequence I The Achill Woman II A False Spring III The Making of an Irish Goddess IV White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland V Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God VI The Photograph on My Father's Desk VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History VIII An Old Steel Engraving IX In Exile X We Are Always Too Late XI What We Lost XII Outside History III Distances The Nights of Childhood The Carousel in the Park Contingencies Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet Our Origins Are in the Sea Midnight Flowers Doorstep Kisses A Different Light Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room Ghost Stories What Love Intended Distances In a Time of Violence 1994 The Singers I Writing in a Time of Violence: A sequence 1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited 2 The Death of Reason 3 March 1 1847. By the First Post 4 In a Bad Light 5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin 6 Inscriptions 7 Beautiful Speech II Legends This Moment Love The Pomegranate At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town The Water-Clock Moths A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City The Parcel Lava Cameo The Source Legends III Anna Liffey Anna Liffey Story Time and Violence The Art of Grief A Woman Painted on a Leaf The Lost Land 1998 I Colony 1 My Country in Darkness 2 The Harbour 3 Witness 4 Daughters of Colony 5 Imago 6 The Scar 7 City of Shadows 8 Unheroic 9 The Colonists 10 A Dream of Colony 11 A Habitable Grief 12 The Mother Tongue II The Lost Land Home The Lost Land Mother Ireland The Blossom Daughter Ceres Looks at the Morning Tree of Life Escape Dublin, 1959 Watching Old Movies When They Were New Heroic Happiness The Last Discipline The Proof that Plato Was Wrong The Necessity for Irony Formal Feeling Whose? Code 2001 I Marriage I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission II Against Love Poetry III The Pinhole Camera IV Quarantine V Embers VI Then VII First Year VIII Once IX Thanked be Fortune X A Marriage for the Millennium XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary II Code Limits Code Making Money Exile! Exile! Once in Dublin How We Made a New Art on Old Ground Emigrant Letters The Burdens of a History Horace Odes: II:XI Echo Hide this Place from Angels Limits 2 How the Earth and All the Planets Were Created A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago Is It Still the Same Suburban Woman: Another Detail Irish Poetry Index of First Lines Index of Titles
