An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 [Hardcover]

Eavan Boland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1996

"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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gathered from her first five published volumes (not including the 1994 collection, In a Time of Violence), these poems mark the path described in Boland's 1995 memoir Object Lessons: The Life of a Woman Poet in Our Time. Readers of that work will recognize-and relish-the way this collection charts a life's course. Early poems, plumbing Irish legend and history, demonstrate Boland's sense of herself as part of a well-defined tradition of Irish poetry. The next selections show a shift of focus to details and topics closer to home-modern life in Ireland's cities and suburbs, her own relationships, her past and her womanhood-and a surer voice. With 1982's Night Feed, and particularly the long sequence, Domestic Interior, Boland begins to study the pattern of her life as woman, poet and mother. These themes are refined in poems from 1987's The Journey, where the poet, amid "the usual hardcovers, half-finished cups,/ clothes piled up on an old chair," probes "the silences in which are our beginnings,/ in which we have an origin like water."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 205 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 393038521X
• ISBN-13: 978-3930385218
• ASIN: 0393038521
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,228,148 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

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars seamus heaney had better make room at the top, February 14, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 (Paperback)

Eavan Boland's early work is collected here. This volume, then, can be read as a progression through a life as a woman and a poet. Her poetry speaks to the everyday human concerns. It also grapples with political issues and personal consequences. If you have not read Boland's work, you should. She is a major voice in Irish literature and in contemporary poetry and deserves recogintion among the best. This volume allows you to see how her work has evolved. Once you read this, I urge you too look at In a Time of Violence, her most recent poetry collection. Also, her memoir, Object Lessons, is a must read for every woman poet today and a good read for anyone interested in poiltics, poetry, Ireland, or womanhood. Boland is also a wonderfully generous person and teacher