Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990

by Eavan Boland

An essential volume by one of our most esteemed poets. "[Boland is] an original, dazzlingly gifted writer.... Uncompromising intellect, wry perception, and verbal brilliance.... A wonderfully elegant and sensual writer, keenly attuned to the pleasures of form and sound.... She's as musically gifted and as uncompromisingly intelligent as Seamus Heaney, and deserves comparable attention." ―David Walker, Field

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature, Ireland, College, School, Female Authors

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

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

[Sophie]

finally finished!!! when you exist outside of history it enables you to create your own and she fuckin did it and I! Love! Her!

[Edita]

The past is an empty café terrace.
[…]
And no way to know what happened then-
none at all-unless, of course, you improvise:
*
I can say how did I get here?
I hardly know the way back, still less forward.
*
Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes
the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?

[Tully Moran]

Accessible bangers. The more I read Boland (this if the first anthology-style poetry collection I have ever completed in its entirety) the more I understood her titles, enjambments, and low-boiling fury (dare I say like a stockpot of water…).
Fav works include: “Bright-Cut Irish Silver”
“We Are Always Too Late” “The Bottle Garden” “Daphne With Her Thighs In Bark”

[meggggg]

ate the house down boots miss boland

[Carolyn]

I love Eavan Boland - in fact, she's my favorite poet - but this collection Feels like an early one, like she was on the cusp of growing into her poetic voice but wasn't quite there yet.

[Taylor Allgeier-Follett]

The first Boland collection I’ve ever read and it makes me really want to read more. I read it to do research on the famine, and it was useful for that, but the collection as a whole is so utterly phenomenal I’m glad I ended up reading the whole thing. The final poem, “Distances” made me cry and I recommend that one in particular.

[Kathy Duffy]

Very evocative images. I enjoyed the Gift of the Birds of America by John James Audubon and the discomfort of The Game. I returned to Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room several times. I found the Ballad of Beauty and Time to be amazing. Will be trying to find more of Boland's work.

[Niamh Ennis]

All I've said so far but most especially the universal in the specific (sometimes not her own) and most especially this rating is for the understanding that comes easily; she writes without pretention of the everyday but there's also more meaning if you go looking for it. Particularly liked the last two poems.

[Simon Slidders]

I have read other individual poems that really impressed and moved me, but very little in this collection really grabbed me.

[Emmawho97]

Heaney wasn't all that, Boland was though.

[avery]

It was written really beautifully, but most of the subject matter was womanhood/motherhood/doing domestic house chores and caring for children and heterosexual marriage. It just wasn’t for me

[Jenna]

I think I'm going to set Boland aside and read something else for a while. While I thought her poem "The Journey" (not included in this collection) might qualify as an immortal masterwork, I generally prefer the compression and tightly-wound intensity of other feminist poets such as Plath.

"Outside History" is divided into three sections. The first section, "Object Lessons," is devoted to parsing out the emotional significance of quotidian objects: a book, a doll, a coffee mug, etc. Some of these poems succeed -- for example, "The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me" is a nice romantic little lyric -- but, as I read them, I kept wishing these poems would delve deeper, that they would unearth some communicable insight that would make me exclaim, "Huh. I never thought about silverware that way before!" Instead, most of these poems seemed too-brief, not communicating much that was memorable to me.

The second section, "Outside History," is a laxly-tied-together poem-sequence exploring the poet's reasons for consciously choosing Human History, rather than Mythology or Natural History, as the cornerstone for her poetry. While I appreciated the humanist sentiment and found it to be powerfully worded in some places, I thought the sequence was uneven: "The Makings of an Irish Goddess" stood out as one of the stronger pieces in the set.

"Distances," the third section, is a wistful evocation of the distances between infancy and adulthood, between Ireland and America (the latter is Eire-born Boland's adopted homeland), between lover and beloved, etc. This section was my favorite (although I felt it contained a few too many poems in which the poet was simply standing alone at her window and commenting rather lazily on the seasonal scenery). Of note, "Contingencies" is a sensual-cum-analytical fruit-filled poem reminiscent of Robert Hass's best work (in particuar, Hass's blackberry-laden "Meditation at Lagunitas"). Another favorite, "What Love Intended," showcases Boland's talent for crafting unexpected and beautiful endings: this poem concludes with a seemingly offhand comment about "the two whitebeams/outside the house" and "the next-door-neighbor/who used to say in April--/when one was slow to bloom--/they were a man and woman."

[Steven]

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.

[Sarah]

Some of these poems were assigned in my college freshman English class (which is why I own this book) but we didn't read it in its entirety. I feel like there is a lot more in these poems than I am able to read out of them, but I still enjoyed them and a lot of them make more sense now that I have some more life experience than they did when I was in college.

I especially liked the poem "Listen. This is the noise of myth" and the "Domestic Interior" sequence of nine poems. This line also caught my attention from "'Daphne with her thighs in bark'": "the opposite of passion / is not virtue / but routine"

[Lindsey]

This is an amazing collection of poetry. I started it on my trip to Ireland back in college and picked it up again a couple months ago. Boland has a quietly observant voice and uses many references to mythology and Irish culture without getting too obscure. She writes a lot about memory, nature, and connections between generations of women, and her words are beautifully chosen. Some of my favorite poems are: "The Journey," "Mountain Time," "Outside History," "Suburban Woman: A Detail," "The Wild Spray," and "Night Feed."

[Kent]

Boland does beautiful work making the suburban landscape into a comfortable, domestic space. It doesn't feel like a place where people sell out (maybe that's what Charles Wright is trying to write?), but instead a place where one settles. And for this speaker, settling, in both the positively and negatively connoted senses, is how she needs to learn how to cope with her deranged Irish identity. How does one claim a country when she spent so little time there? It's a question I think this book comes at from many sides.

[Sarah]

I read this for a class at Notre Dame and really enjoyed it. The book chronicles "everyday" people who have contributed to the fabric of Ireland over the past century or so. I love the message - that these people are "outside" history because they are not famous or powerful like the generals or presidents about whom we read in history books. But in reality the everyday citizens are truly the ones that create a country's history and rich complexity.

[Stephanie]

another one of my favorite poetry collections. we studied her a lot in my women's literature class in york, and i became a big fan. she writes about personal experiences in a way that makes them very outside what know, but also really relatable...? i don't know if i explained that well; you will have to check it out yourself. my favorite in the book is called "doorstep kisses". it's lovely.

[Melissa Martin]

from my skye.

[Kelly]

senior thesis

[Shannon]

Classic.

[Nadine]

poetry by Eavan Boland, about the history of silences. Daily life and activities reported on by a contemporary woman.

[David Ruekberg]

I've taught this to high school seniors with great success.

[Carole]

Strong Irish femal poet - wonderful!

[Rachel]

I read this book a year ago, in between Dostoevsky novels (it more than held its own), and I still think about it nearly every day. Love, love, love.

[Tasha]

Beautiful.

[Destroydecay]

I can't stand feminist pastoral poetic crap. Sorry Eavan Boland, I do not enjoy your work.

[Matt]

Subtle, refined, historically and socially engaged, limpid and quietly turbulent.

I warmed up to it.

[Paul Molyneaux]

It has been some years since I read Boland, but phrases like "light unraveling light" stick in my brain. I remember too, that outside history sent chills down my spine.