A Woman Without a Country: Poems

“What do we grieve for/ when we leave a country?” inquires Boland (Domestic Violence), the Irish poet, anthologist, and Stanford professor, as she follows the lives of her mother and grandmother through the central lyric sequence in this compact eighth collection. Those lives raise once again the questions that have occupied Boland’s career: what does it mean to be an Irish woman artist, leaving and then returning to “a place, or so it seemed,/ Where every inch of ground/ Was a new fever or a field soaked/ To its grassy roots with remembered hatreds?” Boland’s free verse can pause to focus on single images, and on single resonant terms: “elver,” an eel and a color, and a word “for how/ the bay shelves cirrus clouds/ piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea.” She also takes time to relish ancient authors, such as Ovid, who “made the funeral smoke from the mercenary grave/ Spiral up to become a flight of birds.” Her powers may not be gainsaid, yet it may be hard for any but Boland’s committed fans to find her breaking new ground; a confirmation rather than a discovery, these earnest poems show what it takes to make “a hymn/ to the durable and daily implement, the stored/ possibility of another day.” [em](Nov.) [/em]