Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020 A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020 A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century. Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her 'edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history' ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past. Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: 'Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / ... Their hands are full of words.' Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: 'We will not leave you behind', a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.

"Pilar Villar-Argáiz's sustained, meticulous, and exacting study of Eavan Boland opens up and articulates in a fresh way the key dimensions of her poetry. It succeeds not only in tracking the far-reaching ramifications of Eavan Boland's politicized aesthetic as a postcolonial writer but in urging us to revisit the crystalline and precisely etched poems of one of the most significant artists in contemporary Irish culture." Professor Anne Fogarty, University College, Dublin (from the Introduction) This monograph is an original and important contribution to the growing body of critical studies devoted to one of Ireland's major living poets: Eavan Boland (see Haberstroh 1996; Hagen & Zelman 2005). It details the controversies that were prompted by the inclusion of Ireland in a postcolonial framework and then tests the application of an array of cogent theories and concepts to Boland's work. In an attempt to explore the richness and complexity of her poetry, Villar- Argáiz discusses the contradictory pulls in her desire to surpass, and yet at the same time epitomize, Irish nationality. Boland's remarkable achievement as a poet lies in her ability to stretch, by constant negotiations and re-appropriations, the borderlines of inherited definitions of nationality and femininity. Chapters include: Re-examining the postcolonial: Gender and Irish studies, Towards an understanding of Boland's poetry as minority/ postcolonial discourse, A post-nationalist or a post-colonial writer?: Boland's revisionary stance on Mother Ireland, To a "third" space: Boland's imposed exile as a young child, The subaltern in Boland's poetry, Boland's mature exile in the US: An 'Orientalist' writer? and Conclusion. Review: "This rigorous and informative exploration of the poetry of Eavan Boland by Pilar Villar-Argáiz proves the validity of drawing upon the resources of postcolonial theory to illuminate her work. Through the lens of postcolonialism, the deep-seated preoccupations and complex imaginative foundations of Boland's writing are carefully excavated and interpreted. Villar-Argáiz, moreover, in her observant close readings of poems from different phases of the author's oeuvre reveals how recurrent issues such as the problem of national and cultural identity, the ethical responsibility of engaging with the past, and the quest for fluidity and openness are variously engaged with, both aesthetically and philosophically. Villar-Argáiz's sustained, meticulous, and exacting study of Eavan Boland opens up and articulates in a fresh way key dimensions of her poetry. It succeeds not only in tracking the far-reaching ramifications of Eavan Boland's politicized aesthetic as a postcolonial writer but in urging us to revisit the crystalline and precisely etched poems of one of the most significant artists in contemporary Irish culture." - Professor Anne Fogarty, Department of English, University College Dublin, Ireland About the Author: Dr. Pilar Villar-Argáiz lectures in the Department of English Philology at the University of Granada, Spain, where she obtained a European Doctorate in English Studies (Irish Literature). She is the author of Eavan Boland's Evolution As an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider within an Outsider's Culture (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). She has also published extensively on the representation of femininity in contemporary Irish women's poetry, on cinematic representations of Ireland, and on the theoretical background and application of feminism and postcolonialism to the study of Irish literature. In addition, Dr. Villar Argáiz has co-edited two books on English literature. Irish Research Series, No.51

In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.

"Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001) and reproducing all her earlier collections in their entirety, together with two key poems from 23 Poems (1962) and an excerpt from her unpublished 1971 play 'Femininity and Freedom'. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the development of a poet writing in a space she has cleared by critical engagement and experiment with form, theme, and language."--BOOK JACKET.

“Boland offers encouragement to women poets of the future. . . . Her vivid imagery will beguile many.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review These inspiring essays from the celebrated poet Eavan Boland are both critical and deeply personal, revealing the adventure, passion, and struggle of becoming a woman poet. In this thematic sequel to her classic Object Lessons, Boland traces her own experiences as a woman, wife, and mother and their effect on her poetry, and she looks to a world where she can change the poetic past as well as the present.

A powerful work that examines how—even without country or settled identity—a legacy of love can endure. Eavan Boland is considered “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” by Poetry Review. This stunning new collection, A Woman Without a Country, looks at how we construct one another and how nationhood and history can weave through, reflect, and define the life of an individual. Themes of mother, daughter, and generation echo throughout these extraordinary poems, as they examine how—even without country or settled identity—a legacy of love can endure. From “Talking to my Daughter Late at Night” We have a tray, a pot of tea, a scone. This is the hour When one thing pours itself into another: The gable of our house stored in shadow. A spring planet bending ice Into an absolute of light. Your childhood ended years ago. There is No path back to it.