The Book Depository New Selected Poems: Eavan Boland by Eavan Boland
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Price: £13.64
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: New Selected Poems: Eavan Boland : Paperback : Carcanet Press Ltd : 9781847772411 : 1847772412 : 31 Oct 2013 : New and selected poems by Ireland's most acclaimed contemporary female poet. The Book Depository New Selected Poems: Eavan Boland by Eavan Boland - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9781847772411
MPN: 1847772412
GTIN: 9781847772411
Author: Mr B
Rating: 5
Review: “This New Selected is unusual in one respect: it follows a Collected Poems, rather than preceding it. I have included poems from all my previous volumes, beginning with New Territory, taking a broader sampling from some than from others. I have also included some new, as yet unpublished poems. In a small number of poems I have made minor adjustments to punctuation and layout compared with previous versions.” (EB) The New Selected suggests that the selected is new as opposed to the conventional collected, which includes everything previous, and with living poets who one is drawn to, there is a tendency to collect each new volume as it is published, or has been previously unread, and ignore the collected – assuming one has been produced, until one is forced to down size, which is what happened to my poetry library when I downsized, and my basic criteria was the question, ‘When was the last time I looked at this?’ I kept my Gillian Clark because of an unforgettable Poetry Reading she gave to English teachers many moons ago, at a Conference in Swansea, and she was on the syllabus too, and I kept my Denise Levertov because she was so much in harmony with the spirit of Rilke. For some of these poems, reading this was a trip down memory lane, and for some they had exactly the same sound as they had when I first read them, somewhat enchanted, like Sydney’s description of story, as ‘that which stops the child at play and calls the old man from the corner to listen.’ ‘Listen, this is the noise of Myth;’ if the title had been ‘sound of myth’ it would have meant picking one symbol like Heaney’s ‘Tolland Man.’ It is noises, because it is many voices, but it is not a babble, because the poem can tune us in, and we connect with other memories made tangible through the metaphor: “I am definite to start with, but the light is lessening, the hedge losing its detail, the path its edge.” (p.69): or the insight that moves beyond memory “This time, when she looks up, I will be there.” (p.194). In ‘the Achill Woman’ who joins her ‘putting down time until the evening turned cold without warning,’ there is a connection drawn between a mythic past and the tactile present, and memory is no longer a boundary. I do not know if this is a peculiarly Irish gift, perhaps it is because in a way, the landscape is nearer. She ends ‘Irish Poetry’ (p. 194) with ‘the sound of a birds wing in a lost language’ remade so she ‘could see the flight of it’, ‘like the lithe rivers laying down in silence…all at ease, soothed and quiet….” That is the intent of poetry, so the because can unfold.
Author: Disappointed
Rating: 1
Review: I bought this product thinking it was the book, very unclear and no check out or return. I don’t have a kindle so I have wasted my money. Disappointed.
