This is a book not of memorable lines but of memorable poems. Selected from twenty years of Eavan Boland's work, it brings back into circulation writing that has long been unavailable and provides her growing readership with an overview of what she has done.
Eavan Boland's poetry is radically different in tone and texture from the work of her Irish contemporaries. Her concerns are never parochial. In 1979 she renounced "the evasion out of fear from some realities, and the folly of that evasion, because realities catch up with you." Her poems are brave in quest of those realities, finding a language in which to engage them.
