Domestic Violence

Description

Eavan Boland's new collection turns to the domestic interiors in which the dramas of women's lives are played out: seductions and quarrels, anger and grief, the care of children. In her attentiveness to the humdrum realities of suburban life, Boland makes them luminous with the power of live myths. Looking back over her own life, back through the lives of the women who preceded her, Boland arrives at the deep structures of memory where, as she writes, legends are made new 'not by saying them, but by unsettling / one layer of meaning from another'. This is a collection from a poet at the height of her powers, writing with authority and grace.

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She is Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. Carcanet published her prose book Object Lessons (Poetry Book Society Special Commendation) in 1995. Her earlier work has been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, and she is the winner of numerous awards and prizes, including the Lannon Award, the Irish Literature Prize in Poetry, and three PBS Recommendations.

"Eavan Boland lives in a different world, one from which she can see not only "the Dublin mountains", but a looming poetic tradition and the wastes of European history... Her language has a tranquil control as well, for which it sacrifices nothing in grace or expressive power." - The New York Times Book Review.