Eavan BolandA Poet's Dublin

The book arrived, on the earliest date of the range predicted, in excellent condition. The seller is highly recommended.

Eavan Boland is a far too seldom celebrated poet. This book is scenic, poetic tour of Dublin. Boland's images are evocative. Perfect.

Boland is mainly incredible.

Great!!

I discovered this book last October; I was doing a study of Irish poets and came across the title "A Poet's Dublin" and picked up the book on an impulse; as the idea struck me as interesting. _And it is! Boland's poetry grapples with the specificities of a life lived as a woman in an old city – Dublin – with its history, depth of culture(s) and its relationship(s) to the wider world.The poems in this volume explore the influence of a city on a life; on the perspective(s) of a person growing up and living in the city, formed by its culture and society; the relationship between self and place being referenced in some way or another in virtually every poem. Boland’s pics incarnate the sense of the poetic pieces; they sometimes augment or question the texts with which they are connected. Overall, I feel that the pics allow me to be in ‘the poet’s Dublin’ while I am grappling with what the poet is trying so adroitly to communicate.Dawn to dusk, Boland’s poems capture the breadth and depth of a day as well as reflect the Seasons via the realities of the streets and locales of Dublin as the Liffey flows through it. Her work achieves a poetics of the ordinary. From the heart of the city to the foothills of the surrounding countryside, the reader goes journeying with the poet; listening, responding and coming-to-place in Dublin with her—or, at least, that is a goal foreshadowed in close reading, even if a reader (like myself) cannot always catch the drift of meaning in the ever-flowing lines (like the Liffey itself) all at once.The conversation which ends the book – between Boland and another Irish Dublin Poet; Paula Meehan, who is also one of the editors of A Poet’s Dublin – adds a present-voiced reflection to Boland’s life, bringing out dimensions of struggle between gender and vocation; how it is to be a woman poet in Dublin – and between vocation and politics. This conversation introduced me to Meehan, whose work I would now like to read as well!I will no doubt be re-reading the poetry in this volume; coming to a better understanding of the poet and her/our world.

Lovely tribute to Dublin!

This book was published to celebrate the Irish poet Eavan Boland’s, 70th birthday, but it is also a celebration of place, which is something that she, currently professor of Humanities at Stanford University, and another Irish poet, Paula Meehan, discuss at the end of the book. The place is Dublin, and like most Capitals which are also cultural centers, it has a river, and one cannot think of the one without the other. It is difficult to think of London without remembering the Thames, or Paris, the Seine; in this case it is the Liffey, which Boland gives the full name of Anna Liffey, a poem almost in the centre of this collection of poems.Having made a selection with Paula Meehan, Eavan then revisits the city to photograph connections, which of course enables those who know Dublin well, to connect, at perhaps a different level to the poems, but as she says, ‘the camera is a heavy handed editor,’ both with memory and the forms of the landscape of a city. For most things that enter memory, there are two levels of significance, just as there are with two levels of significance with words. On one level is what the word or place refers to, and that in a sense, has a short-term utility, because what is referred to can change, and with a place, it is perhaps more obvious with changes in appearance. The other level, which is the emotional reference, and is more resistant to change, and revisiting, such as the one undertaken here, can produce assonance or dissonance, which is perhaps why the opening selection, is entitled ‘City of Shadows.’ As she says in ‘Once in Dublin’ – “Small things make the past. Make the present seem out of place.”One image is repeated in ‘Anna Liffey’: of a woman in a doorway. She can look back into the street, into the house, and reflect upon what she sees, but she can also see the streets that could not have imagined the present. She connects with the old woman now, in the doorway. The river. But she does not want to enter the house again, knowing that in fact she cannot, so she drives the car on, imitating the river. She read’s Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted village,’ realizing a resonance with the fact that the first loss of a people is through history, and then it is through language, and one can only revisit, attended with one’s ghost. My first comment to an Irish friend of mine was, ‘this is a lovely book.’

Wonderful poetry. I thought I had danced all day and all night with Anna Liffey and had come to know her from head to toe.