[In the following review, McFall discusses what Boland's An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems (1967–1987) reveals about the poet.]

Eavan Boland's work caught my attention almost ten years ago when a friend sent me three pages xeroxed from The Journey and Other Poems, published by Carcanet, a book which established her poetic maturity and stature. I instantly liked the selection: "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951," "I Remember," "Fond Memory," and "Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland," because of the truthful voice I heard, ardent and wise, committed to form, but not shackled by it.

Boland has been publishing poems for thirty years; in the last decade, she has emerged not only as a premier Irish poet and critic (her recent Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in our Time attests to that), but as a poet who transcends national boundaries. Since 1990, Norton has issued three volumes of her poems: Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990, In a Time of Violence, and her most recent, An Origin Like Water, which contains all the poems Boland wanted to preserve from the years 1967–1987, culled from New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.

The book is, roughly, an expanded version of Carcanet's Selected Poems, augmented with a preface by the poet, so that some of what has already been said about that volume still stands. There is the evidence of Plath in the poems from In Her Own Image and the charm of her poems dealing with the painters Chardin, Degas, and Ingres. The title of the last, however, has been astutely revised from "Woman Posing" to "Pose," and "On Renoir's The Grape-Pickers" has been omitted, perhaps because Boland found it wanting compared to others. Two additional poems, which appear in the Night Feed section of her Selected Poems and which are excised in the current volume, are "A Ballad of Home" and "Before Spring"; they are not missed, as their subjects are treated with greater complexity elsewhere.

That Boland still claims so much of her early work is lucky for readers who would trace her poetic development. In her preface, with its belated recognition of her enterprise, she asserts that her work has moved from that which "struggled for skill and avoided risk" to that which grew from a "forceful engagement between a life and a language," specifically a woman's life and language. Certainly, her starting point is common to all young poets, though the leap she makes would appear problematic given her gender, at odds with a male literary inheritance.

In the book's first poem "Athene's Song," we glimpse the manifestation of Boland's dilemma in the figure of Athene, whose first utterance is "From my father's head I sprung" and whose "new music," created from her "pipe of bone," ultimately "like my mind / Remains unknown." Athene, like the female poet, is stuck, rendered mute by the pressures of history and expectation.

Driving this point home are Boland's programmatic iambic tetrameter line and the overshadowing influence of Yeats, whose "salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas" from "Sailing to Byzantium" is recalled in her line "Fish sprung in the full river." Yet in the next poem, "From the Painting Back from Market by Chardin," Boland augurs her later project and accomplishment, her account of "what great art removes: / Hazard and death. The Future and past. / A woman's secret history and her loves—."

Boland's selections from New Territory reveal a concentration on traditional form, which she later throws off, and numerous long-standing features of her work: her knowledge of myth, her attraction to literary and political history, her wit, her eye for the telling, ordinary detail, and her gift for extended metaphor. Her sensibility is keenly felt in her poem on Chardin and her imagination works impressively in poems like "New Territory" and "Migration." Yet Boland herself feels slightly absent, at a remove.

It is not until her second volume War Horse that her mission as witness to her experience as a woman and a poet takes off in poems that address violence and explore the bounds and bonds of marriage, family, and suburbia, "a devalued subject matter," as she has called it in Object Lessons. Poems from In Her Own Image and Night Feed deal with women's issues even more directly in form as well as theme. With short, truncated lines, poems like "Menses," "Mastectomy," and "Anorexia" examine women's sexuality. Boland dwells on the ordinary, domestic experience of women in the sequence "Domestic Interiors" and poems such as "Degas's Laundress" and "Woman in Kitchen." In "It's a Woman's World," she coolly, ironically observes:

     Our way of life
     has hardly changed
     since a wheel first
     whetted a knife.
 
     Maybe flame
     burns more greedily,
     and wheels are steadier
     but we're the same
 
     who milestone
     our lives
     with oversights—
     living by the lights
 
     of the loaf left
     by the cash register,
     the washing powder
     paid for and wrapped,
 
     the wash left wet:
     like most historic peoples
     we are defined
     by what we forget,
 
     by what we never will be
     star-gazers,
     fire-eaters.
     It's our alibi
 
     for all time:
     as far as history goes
     we were never
     on the scene of the crime.

This poem, among others, illustrates Boland's particular, distinctive stance, developed over time. She stands within the parameters of traditional female experience and chronicles it in lyric (or, she would say, "anti-lyric") form, a form which historically has taken as one of its themes the woman as object. Speaking from this vantage point, she renders her project not only radical, but subversive, for she is able to draw back the blind, demythicize, and alter both the subject and subject matter of the genre.

Selections from The Journey, the final volume represented, epitomize this, especially the much praised title poem, which achieves that imperative articulated by Boland in an interview with Jody Allen-Randolph in the 1993 Irish University Review's special issue on Boland: "The woman poet has to write her poem free of any resonance of the object she once was in it." To read "The Journey" is to see how clearly she has freed herself from that resonance, but only by the hard-won effort of her poems that have come before.

Bald, feminist statement is banished for an all-encompassing human and female poetic rendering of experience which stands inherited tradition on its head. Sappho (not Virgil) takes the poet on a journey to the underworld to discover and identify with a host of suffering women, whose children died before the advent of antibiotics. In this poem, Boland is claimed by Sappho as her "daughter" (as contrasted with the early figure of Athene, whose originator is Zeus) and is cautioned to remember what she's seen and "know forever / the silences in which are our beginnings, / in which we have an origin like water."

The poet's cathartic dream occurs in the intimacy of her bedroom, where she has been reading and is fueled by an incantation of repeated syntactical structures: "and I would have known her anywhere / and I would have gone with her anywhere…." Idea and form are perfectly melded here, and we recognize that Boland has indeed found a language to embody her experience of being a woman as well as a poet with self-engendered authorial power.

Seven years ago, in The London Review of Books, Neil Corcoran observed about the Carcanet edition of Boland's Selected Poems: "[This] is one of those carefully pruned volumes in which a poet of quiet, meticulous, patient craft stands revealed as something more interesting and integrated than her individual books had led one to anticipate." His choice of words suggests a subversive activity. Whatever we call it, this new volume, enlarging on the old, reveals that while others weren't looking, Eavan Boland "made a new music" to reflect her mind as well as her life.