New Collected Poems

Eavan Boland

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781857548587
• eBook ISBN: 9781847779618
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001) and reproducing all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the development of a poet writing in a space she has cleared by critical engagement and experiment with form, theme and language.

IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE 1994

I Writing in a Time of Violence
A sequence

As in a city where the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater or less.

Plato, The Republic: X

1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited

– and not simply by the fact that this shading of

forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,

the gloom of cypresses

is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove

to the borders of Connacht

and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass

rough-cast stone had

disappeared into as you told me

in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,

Relief Committees gave

the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down

the map of this island, it is never so

I can say here is

the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor

an ingenious design which persuades a curve

into a plane,

but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger

and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,

and finds no horizon

will not be there.

2 The Death of Reason

When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fires down in

the hayricks and seed-barns of a darkening Ireland,

the art of portrait-painting reached its height

across the water.

The fire caught.

The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold

and the wind carried staves of a ballad.

The flesh-smell of hatred.

And she climbed the stairs.

Nameless composite. Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.

Rustling gun-coloured silks. To set a seal on Augustan London.

And sat down.

The easel waits for her

and the age is ready to resemble her and

the small breeze cannot touch that powdered hair.

That elegance.

But I smell fire.

From Antrim to the Boyne the sky is reddening as

the painter tints alizerine crimson with a mite of yellow

mixed once with white and finds out

how difficult it is to make the skin

blush outside the skin.

The flames have crossed the sea.

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Note
• from 23 POEMS 1962
• NEW TERRITORY 1967
• from ‘FEMININITY AND FREEDOM’ 1971
• THE WAR HORSE 1975
• IN HER OWN IMAGE 1980
• NIGHT FEED 1980
• THE JOURNEY 1987
• OUTSIDE HISTORY 1990
• IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE 1994
• THE LOST LAND 1998
• CODE 2001
• Index of First Lines
• Index of Titles
• About the Author
• Also by Eavan Boland from Carcanet Press
• Copyright