by Eavan Boland
Woman Turns Herself into a Fish, The, 126
Women, The, 173
Years ago I left the guest-house, 179
Yeats in Civil War, 24
Yesterday I knew no lullaby, 52
You’re propped and swabbed and bedded, 195
You rise, you dawn, 115
PRAISE FOR EAVAN BOLAND
“Eavan Boland is the real thing. I marvel at the skill and imagination
behind these ravishing poems.” —James Merrill
“Boland has emerged as one of the best poets in Ireland.”
—Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books
“Boland combines impeccable craft, resilient metaphors and, above all, moral
authority to witness human difficulties.” —Jan Garden Castro, Nation
“One of Ireland’s finest contemporary writers, as passionate and
ambitious as Kenneally, as classical and meticulous as Heaney. . . . This
is profound moving work from a poet at the height of her powers.”
—Booklist (on In a Time of Violence)
POETRY
New Territory
The War Horse
Night Feed
The Journey
Selected Poems: 1989
Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990
In a Time of Violence
The Lost Land
PROSE
Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and
the Poet in Our Time
EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1944 and is currently a professor of English at Stanford University. Her The Lost Land, In a Time of Violence, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, and Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990 are also available in paperback from Norton. She received a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry in 1994.
Here is the collected early work, long unavailable in the United States, of one of our major poets. Comprising poems from Eavan Boland’s five early volumes—New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey—An Origin Like Water demonstrates now Boland’s mature voice has developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.
Copyright © 1996 by Eavan Boland
All rights reserved
Book design by JAM DESIGN
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Boland, Eavan
An origin like water : collected poems, 1967–1987 / Eavan Boland.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Ireland—Poetry. I Title.
PR6052.035075 1996
821′.914—dc20 95-19645
ISBN 0-393-03852-1
ISBN 978-0-393-31601-8
ISBN 0-393-31601-7 pbk.
ISBN 978-0-393-28573-4 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT