Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990

by Eavan Boland

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393308228
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/17/2001
Edition description:	(Reissued)
Pages:	154
Sales rank:	214,650
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

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

Part 1
I	Object Lessons
	The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me	19
	The Rooms of Other Women Poets	20
	Object Lessons	22
	On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon	24
	The Game	25
	The Shadow Doll	26
	The River	27
	Mountain Time	28
	Bright-cut Irish Silver	29
	We Were Neutral in the War	30
II	Outside History
1	The Achill Woman	35
2	A False Spring	37
3	The Making of an Irish Goddess	38
4	White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland	40
5	Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God	41
6	The Photograph on My Father's Desk	43
7	We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History	44
8	An Old Steel Engraving	45
9	In Exile	46
10	We Are Always Too Late	47
11	What We Lost	48
12	Outside History	50
III	Distances
	The Latin Lesson	53
	Nights of Childhood	55
	The Carousel in the Park	56
	Contingencies	58
	Spring at the Edge of the Sonnet	59
	Our Origins Are in the Sea	60
	Midnight Flowers	61
	Doorstep Kisses	62
	A Different Light	63
	Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child's Room	64
	Ghost Stories	66
	What Love Intended	67
	Distances	69
Part 2
I	The Journey
	The Oral Tradition	75
	Mise Eire	78
	Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening	80
	The Glass King	82
	The Women	84
	The Briar Rose	86
	Fever	87
	Lace	89
	The Unlived Life	91
	The Journey	93
	Envoi	97
	Suburban Woman: A Detail	98
	I Remember	100
	The Bottle Garden	101
	Growing-up	102
	Sarah on Holiday	103
	Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland	104
	An Irish Childhood in England: 1951	106
	The Emigrant Irish	108
	Fond Memory	109
	The Wild Spray	110
	Nocturne	112
	Listen. This Is the Noise of Myth	113
II	Domestic Interior
	Degas's Laundresses	119
	Woman in Kitchen	121
	A Ballad of Beauty and Time	122
	The Serpent in the Garden	125
	Pose	127
	"Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark"	128
	The New Pastoral	130
	The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish	131
	The Muse Mother	134
	In the Garden	136
	On Renoir's The Grape-Pickers	138
	Domestic Interior	139
1	Night Feed	139
2	Monotony	141
3	Energies	143
4	Hymn	144
5	Patchwork	145
6	Endings	147
7	Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray	148
8	After a Childhood away from Ireland	149
9	Domestic Interior	151

What People are Saying About This

J. D. McClatchy

Eavan Boland is a marvelous poet, and Outside History is the best possible introduction to her work. Love and anxiety, memories and mysteries—she's woven them all into a rich verse fabric, thrown like a flowered shawl over her shoulders as she stands out under the chilling night sky, no other soul around but (for that haunting moment) the reader's own.

Editorial Reviews

"Eavan Boland is a marvelous poet, and Outside History is the best possible introduction to her work. Love and anxiety, memories and mysteries—she's woven them all into a rich verse fabric, thrown like a flowered shawl over her shoulders as she stands out under the chilling night sky, no other soul around but (for that haunting moment) the reader's own."

J. D. McClatchy

"[Boland] pursues an important, feminist revision of the history-making so often praised or inherited by MacNeice and Heaney. Not so much outside of history as counter to it, or in the process of amending it through addition, Boland has developed in her poetry what Harold Bloom might call an agonistic relationship with the paternal, natural, and often silencing history of traditional Irish poetry. . . . An attentive powerful, encouraging poet."

Kenyon Review - David Baker

With this volume Boland, an Irish poet, establishes herself as an important voice in contemporary poetry. Through close attention to the specific details of women's domestic lives, she transcends minutiae and gives shape to the larger emotions and truths of those lives. In ``Woman in Kitchen,''sic where the ``tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes / the round lunar window of the washer / . . . in a room white and quiet as a mortuary,'' she exposes the inner vitality of her subject by evoking the exterior. The theme of both the creative and the imprisoning power of myth recurs throughout. In the excellent title sequence, Boland explores the movement of women from myth to history, evoking the painful awareness implicit in any move toward self-determination: ``Out of myth into / history I move to be / part of that ordeal / whose darkness is / only now reaching me from the field.'' Her sharpened skill with language, rhythm and form permeates each poem in a collection that is a delight to ear and mind. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is the first book that the Irish poet Boland has published in America. The poems, slackly composed, consist largely of shopworn prose clunkily parsed into lines: ``Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes/ the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?'' Her perspective on the world is self-referential to the point of narcissism; in one poem she informs us that she is wearing ``a denim skirt,/ a blouse blended in/ by the last light,'' in another that she was ``a nine-year-old in high fawn socks,'' in yet another that she attended ``a school where all the children wore darned worsted.'' Boland also attempts to go mythic, with occasionally risible results: ``Look at me, says the tree./ I was a woman once like you,/ full-skirted, human.''-- Frank Lepkowski, Oakland Univ. Lib., Rochester, Mich.

Library Journal