Steven's review
Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990
by Eavan Boland
Steven's review
Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990 by Eavan Boland
Steven's review
rating:
Upon reflecting on Ms. Boland's poems, an old proverb came into my mind: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It seems in her ambitious goal to re-tell the history of her country and her country's emigrants, Boland knew that to get the attention and recognition she would need to add her voice to Ireland's national discourse, she would have to use the master's tools to at least build another room, a "Domestic Interior", through which she could let her readers re-vision Irish history. The skill with which she mines nature for luminous images, similes and metaphors exemplifies how well she studied the masters of poetry from her country, such as Yeats and Heaney. But, it is in the addition of the domestic details, feminine myths and witnessing of the "servitude" (36) by Irish women that elevates Boland's work above homage to her country's past and into shining new cultural artifacts that add an untold dimension to history.
