A Poet's Dublin

by Eavan Boland

Overview

Juxtaposing verse and image, A Poet’s Dublin is a study of origin and influence from “a major Irish poet” (Edward Hirsch).

Written over years, the transcendent and moving poems in A Poet’s Dublin seek out shadows and impressions of a powerful, historic city, studying how it forms and alters language, memory, and selfhood. The poems range from an evocation of the neighborhoods under the hills where the poet lived and raised her children to the inner-city bombing of 1974, and include such signature poems as “The Pomegranate,” “The War Horse,” and “Anna Liffey.” Above all, these poems weave together the story of a self and a city—private, political, and bound by history. The poems are supported by photographs of the city at all times and in all seasons: from dawn on the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, to twilight up in the Dublin foothills.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393285376
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	27 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Eavan Boland (1944—2020) was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Outside History and several volumes of nonfiction, and was coeditor of the anthology The Making of Poem. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she was one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. She received a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, among other honors. She taught at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, and Stanford University, where she was the director of the creative writing program.

Table of Contents

Introduction Jody Allen Randolph xi

I City of Shadows

'As Dusk Fell on the City' 1

Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet 3

Once in Dublin 5

Unheroic 7

The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City 11

City of Shadows 13

A False Spring 17

Tree of Life 21

Nationhood: Two Failed Sonnets 23

The Dolls Museum in Dublin 25

An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears 29

We were Neutral in the War 31

Heroic 37

Child of Our Time 39

Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland 41

II Gifts of the River

'I Begin with the Liffey …' 45

The Scar 47

Anna Liffey 49

How the Dance Came to the City 61

The Harbour 63

The Long Evenings of their Leave-Takings 67

And Soul 69

The Proof That Plato Was Wrong 71

Escape 75

Cityscape 79

III Under these Hills

'Dundrum is an Anglicisation of a Gaelic Place Name…' 83

The War Horse 85

This Moment 89

Night Feed 91

The Pomegranate 93

The Mother Tongue 97

Witness 101

In Our Own Country 103

Making Money 105

What Love Intended 109

Once 113

A Marriage for the Millennium 115

Re-Reading Oliver Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' in a Changed Ireland 119

Two Poets and a City: A Conversation, Eavan Boland and Paula Merhan 125

Notes on the Photographs 149

Index 157

Editorial Reviews

"For Boland, one feels poetry has to be honorable and natural, though at times as terrifying as giving birth alone in the open meadow, and that it is also made of blood and the guilt of being human."

Yusef Komunyakaa

★ 12/01/2016
The chill and grit of Dublin eddy through this collection of poems by one of Ireland's most beloved poets, whose observations of everyday life in the "cast iron and adamant" Irish capital will make residents look at their city anew and all others feel they are walking the city's streets. The poems were selected by Paula Meehan (Dharmakaya) and Jody Allen Randolph (Eavan Boland) to create "a topography of the city with the poet in particular places at different ages and phases of her life." The poems also explore home and inner lives that are born of place and resonate with Dublin details: the white pepper, the history that is a daily presence: "The patriot was made of drenched stone./ His lips were still speaking./ The gun/ he held had just killed someone." The pieces are accompanied by Boland's black-and-white photographs of Dublin; some depict a place or thing mentioned in the poem they complement, while others are antagonistic ormerely evocative of the city. The title closes with a conversation between Meehan, herself an urban poet, and Boland. VERDICT Essential for Irish studies collections and the poetry shelves of larger public libraries.—Henrietta Verma, National Information Standards Organization, Baltimore

Library Journal