New Collected Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:24th Nov '05
Should be back in stock very soon
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all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'.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.
John Redmond, The Guardian, Saturday 18th February 2006
In the heaven of lost futures
John Redmond admires Eavan Boland's forlorn, regretful collection.
Should a poem want to stop? In The End of the Poem, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben associates the conclusion of any poem with a crisis, a catastrophe, in which the poem fears its identity may be lost as it plunges down towards prose. Yet some poets enjoy the crisis so much that their poems end many times. Such a writer is Eavan Boland, for whom the full-stop might have been invented. Using unusually emphatic line-endings, her poems appear to relish cutting themselves. A Boland poem often begins with a one-word line which is also a one-word sentence: "Dusk." "Look." "August." "Ballyvaughan." Pursuing a staccato aesthetic draws some of the poems into self-parody but others, such as "This Moment" are pleasantly atmospheric: "A neighbourhood. / At dusk.
ISBN: 9781857548587
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 15mm
Weight: unknown
332 pages