The Lost Land: Poems [Hardcover]

Eavan Boland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

The internationally acclaimed Irish poet powerfully and movingly continues to merge private and mythic history. "I imagine myself / at the landward rail of that boat / searching for the last sight of a hand. / I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land: / Ireland. Absence. Daughter." "The Lost Land" in this magnificent volume is, in the poet's words, "not exactly a country and not entirely a state of mind . . . the lost land is not a place that can be subdivided into history, or love, or memory. It is the poet's own, single, and private account of the ghostly territory where so much human experience comes to be stored."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eavan Boland's powerful ninth collection is taut with brutal truths and beautiful, sad images--explorations of Ireland's tragic history. In "Unheroic," for example, she finds the best of her country not in its fossilized heroic statuary, but in the unsung and unhealed. Another poem in the first sequence, "The Colonists," is a tour de force of imaginative sympathy and irony, in which the conquerors are at last turning into a ghostly, tearful crew, no longer able to navigate the land they once possessed: "They are holding maps / But the pages are made of fading daylight." A third standout is the lyrical and staccato "A Dream of Colony," a vision of wish-fulfillment in which words can reverse the past:

Each phrase of ours,
holding still for a moment in the stormy air,
raised an unburned house
at the end of an avenue of elder and willow.

Unturned that corner
the assassin eased around and aimed from.
Undid. Unsaid:
Once. Fire. Quick. Over there.

In her essay "Outside History," Boland declares: "A society, a nation, a literary heritage is always in danger of making up its communicable heritage from its visible elements. Women, as it happens, are not especially visible in Ireland." The Lost Land is out to bring women inside history. "Formal Feeling," finds the poet proclaiming that the distaff half will no longer be willfully blinded and kept down by myth; in a triumphant conclusion, she calls upon Eros to "see the difference / This time--and this you did not ordain-- / I am changing the story." Still, for each heightened moment in the volume there are several more grief-stricken ones, and it is this tension that gives Boland's work its strength and shadows. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly

At once dispassionate and intimate, this collection?a novella and five short stories?is a remarkable debut by a writer who explores the fraught legacies of Chinese immigrants who try to forget their origins in order to fit into a new culture. In the title novella, a prodigiously gifted musician, passed over for tenure at a New York music school, invests his stern passion in the talent of his youngest daughter. This tragic story, told by the musician's wife, is nothing short of a tour de force. Echoes of the musician surface in other stories?in a photocopy machine salesman who gave up his dream of becoming a scientist and in a lab instructor who patiently waits to be promoted. Two of the narratives take place in New York, one in the Midwest. Two are not about immigrants at all: a fable of sorts and a tale told by the servant of a rich businessman in Shanghai as the Communist Army bears down on the city. In three of the works, the heart of the story is in the charged relationship between Chinese fathers and American-born daughters. In "The Eve of the Spirit Festival," one daughter remembers her sister mimicking their father while the two clean up the house so that the father can entertain his university colleagues: "It's the way he acts around them. "'Herro, herro! Hi Blad, Hi Warry! Let me take your coat. Howsa Giants game?'" Though Chang writes of Chinese-Americans, her deeper subject is the fierce, helpless loves within families. Comparisons to Amy Tan are perhaps unavoidable, but they are insufficient to describe this darker, more piercing young writer. Author tour. (Oct.) FYI: Chang's work has twice been selected to appear in the Best American Short Stories anthology, and she has received both a Wallace Stegner and a Truman Capote fellowship.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 67 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039304663X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393046632
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,754,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland. At the age of six, she and her family relocated to London. She later returned to Dublin for school, and she received her B.A. from Trinity College in 1966. She was also educated in London and New York.

Her books of poetry include New Collected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), Domestic Violence, (2007), Against Love Poetry (2001), The Lost Land (1998), An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 (1996), In a Time of Violence (1994), Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (1990), The Journey and Other Poems (1986), Night Feed (1982), and In Her Own Image (1980).

In addition to her books of poetry, Boland is also the author of Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (W. W. Norton, 1995), a volume of prose, After Every War (Princeton, 2004), an anthology of German women poets, and she co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000) and The Making of a Sonnet (with Edward Hirsch; W. W.Norton 2007. She also edited Irish Writers on Irish Writing (Trinity Press: 2007) and Charlotte Mew: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press 2008). A book of essays on women and poetry, called "A Journey with Two Maps" is forthcoming.

Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award.She has taught at Trinity College, University College, Bowdoin College, and she was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. she is currently a professor of English at Stanford University where she directs the creative writing program.She divides her time between Dublin and California. Boland and her husband, author Kevin Casey, have two daughters.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These are wonderful poems!, May 23, 2004

By 

Anita Brenner "anita_b" (La Canada Flintridge, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Land: Poems (Paperback)

//

The poems in The Lost Land trace the history of Ireland from the time "after the wolves and before the elms" to the present.

In addition, some of the poems are also about language, i.e. the effect of the imposition of English on the Irish and the idea that the words we speak today contain the memory of other languages.

"That is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this"

("A Habitable Grief", at p. 32 of The Lost Land,)

"What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open"

("Witness" at p. 18 of The Lost Land)

As always, wonderful poems from Eavan Boland.

4.0 out of 5 stars Shocking, May 5, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lost Land: Poems (Paperback)

"The Lost Land" stands out from Boland's previous collections for its precise, cutting indictments of the colonists and the repression in Irish history. The poem "The Necessity For Irony" shocked me as well, and other poems such as "Heroic" voiced those nagging feminist desires to be heroic and triumphant. In all, a complex and divining collection that rings with meaning (for women, and for poets, at least) that has trouble with the short, dense sentences that can bore after awhile.

3.0 out of 5 stars So-so., August 11, 2003

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Land: Poems (Paperback)

Eavan Boland, The Lost Land (Norton, 1998)

Irish poet Eavan Boland may be one of the most critically acclaimed and much-lauded unknown poets in the world. She's served two terms as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, won the Lannan Award, curated poetry exhibits, published eight books of poetry and one of prose to the delight of critics everywhere, had poetry appear in all three of the great triumvirate of American poetry magazines (The New Yorker, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review), and yet, somehow, when the name comes up, even many of the most astute and well-read poets cock their heads like dogs trying to learn a new command. Why this is, I've no idea. But it could have something to do with the poetry itself.

Don't get me wrong. Obviously, if the editors of the Three Best Poetry Magazines in America™ are thrilled with Boland's poetry, the rest of us would be heathenish rabble to criticize. And yet, while reading through The Lost Land, it dawned on me that Boland likes to use short sentences. Very short. A lot. In every poem. (You get the idea.) Her subject matter is almost always thought-provoking and fresh, the presentation of them impressionist, minimal, and often sublime. But then some those short sentences that transform the thing from a gentle flow into the rapids.

"I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all."
("The Lost Land")

It's as if Boland is trying to replicate a pattern of speech that grates on the nerves. Which, in small doses, can be a powerful statement, but in a book-length collection, where it's used frequently, it does get annoying.

Still, that's not a reason to completely disparage the book. Boland's work does have a compelling nature to it, a method of expression that keeps the pages turning and is, in fact, quite impressive. With a bit better flow control, this would be perfect stuff. ** ½