Outside History

Outside History was Eavan Boland's first collection of new poems since The Journey (1987). Here she explores private themes, but in ways which open out on the wider public sphere. Often the poems arise from the place in which womanhood and nationhood meet, a place that Irish history sometimes obscures, hence the title, Outside History. The 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' which the London Review of Books identified in her Selected Poems remains a source of power in this new work, heightened by her sensual and painterly lyricism. The domestic and the historical come together: a wealth of vivid 'obstinate details' evokes a larger emotional world. Eavan Boland is indeed 'a fine poet moving on to a new plateau of achievement' (LRB).