The journey and other poems

by Eavan Boland

Book by Boland, Eavan

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published January 1, 1987

About the author

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). Her poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She was married to the novelist Kevin Casey.

Reviews

[raluca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am definite
to start with
but the light is lessening,
the hedge losing its detail,
the path its edge.

Look at me, says the tree.
I was a woman once like you,
full-skirted, human.

Suddenly I am not certain
of the way I came
or the way I will return,
only that something.
which may be nothing
more than darkness has begun
softening the definitions
of my body, leaving

the fears and all the terrors”
(from 'A Suburban Woman: a Detail')

*

“What I have done I have done alone.
What I have seen is unverified.
I have the truth and I need the faith.
It's time I put my hand in her side.

If she will not bless the ordinary,
if she will not sanctify the common,
then here I am and here I stay and then am I
the most miserable of women.”
(from 'Envoi')

*

“We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to? -
in a strange city, in another country,
on nights in a North-facing bedroom,
waiting for the sleep that never did
restore me as I'd hoped to what I'd lost -

let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen-fifty-one”
(from “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951″)

*

“I loved you once.
It seemed so right, so neat.
The moon, the month, the flower, the kiss ~
there wasn’t anything that wouldn't fit.
The ends were easy
and the means were short
when you and I were lyric and elect.
Shall I tell you what we overlooked?”
(from ‘Tirade for the Lyric Muse’)

[Travis Wise · Rating 3 out of 5]

At her most memorable when she writes of womanhood.

(Read as a part of Boland’s New Collected Poems)