Vivid and passionate, if at times repetitive, Boland's 10th book of verse returns to familiar subjects: Irish landscapes, seascapes and townscapes, erotic passion and persistent anger between men and women, households that carry the weight of an unjust history, and Boland's own hopes to make that history clear. Boland (Against Love Poetry
) pursues, in fierce, accessible free verse her sense that the personal is political. She also depicts a pathos in nature, using attractive lyrical symbols: "the red-billed bird/ with swept-back wings always trying to/ arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it/ might have occupied." Elsewhere she describes the uneasiness of love: "nothing is ever entirely/ right in the lives of those who love each other." Though all her books invoke her Irish roots, this one is more self-consciously Irish than most: several poems address, or describe, Irish art, such as James Melton's 1765 engraving of a Dublin mansion. Boland links herself to a national past, even as she interrogates it on feminist and other grounds, and even as she turns to familial subjects: to her own memory, to advancing age, to questions any mother might ask, such as how to know "what I have to leave behind, to give my daughters." (Mar.)
