Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990

If you're interested in reading Boland, this is the book to get. Here you see a genuine artist grimly struggling with the details of her craft and often managing to say the true and difficult thing. Something terrible happens in the later books, I'm afraid, in which Boland develops possibly the worst case of complacency and hubris in contemporary poetry. It's almost as if she loses all faith in language and stakes her claim entirely on the basis of sociology, on being "an important voice" that must be heard. There are just too many other voices out there who are still struggling with their art, who have not yet succumbed to vanity and cashing in on the benefits of being an overstuffed "public" poet (facilitated by the academy, unfortunately, with their fat endowed chairs and inflated reading fees) to seriously accept the later books along with the grand claims Boland demands for them. This book, though, gives hints of what might have been.

Eavan Boland, with her words of flowing lyric, succeeds at giving the lives of women a place in poetry, and myth a voice. This anthology is practically a catalog of her growth as a poet. Her poetic talent makes for a comforting read. You can feel yourself ascending from hell with Sappho in "The Journey." It is a must read for those who appreciate contemporary poetry or women's issues.