Against Love Poetry: Poems
by Eavan Boland
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Description
These powerful poems are written against the perfections and idealizations of traditional love poetry. The man and woman in these poems are husband and wife, custodians of ordinary, aging human love. They are not figures in a love poem. Time is their essential witness, and not their destroyer.Tags
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Member Reviews
This is such a finely-crafted collection of poems, a meditation on the ordinariness of love, on the tension that exists between "womanhood" and the "servitudes of custom." Boland's observations are keen, picking apart not love but the conventions of love poetry, the expectations that lie behind relationships. 'Irish Poetry', 'Thanked Be Fortune' and especially 'Quarantine' are the stand-out poems for me—'Quarantine' startled me into near tears. I'm a generation or so further removed from the Famine than Boland is, but it's still a part of the landscape I grew up in, and Boland's writing about it always has a fierce power for me.
Beautiful.
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Irish writers
87 works; 17 members
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01
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Author Information
41+ Works 3,046 Members
Eavan Boland, author of, most recently, "The Lost Land", is professor of English at Stanford University. (Bowker Author Biography)
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