In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer s glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer s level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life."

Eavan Boland was a trailblazing poet, critic, teacher, and essayist. Her writing shifted the conversation on how women redefined poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—both in Ireland and abroad. This generous and wise volume contains essays selected from the two volumes Boland published during her lifetime, Object Lessons (1995) and A Journey with Two Maps (2011); major later writings addressing the changing nature of poetry, the poet, and Ireland; and an unpublished draft of “Daughter�—an extended lyric essay that Boland was working on at the time of her death. With a compelling blend of memoir, analysis, and argument, Citizen Poet traces the arc of Boland’s pioneering view of nationhood through the lens of womanhood. Carving a path for the next generation, she broke open the male-dominated canon of Irish literature and mapped her poetic journey through the contours of life as a mother, daughter, and citizen.

Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.

The landmark collected work of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov’s Collected Poems presents her marvelous, groundbreaking work in full.

Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.” A staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets.

Ten years ago Carcanet published Eavan Boland's first Collected Poems, a book which confirmed her place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. The New Collected Poems brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). It also fills out the early record, reproducing two key poems from 23 Poems (1962), New Territory (1967), The War Horse (1975) and her later books; it includes passages from her unpublished 1971 play Femininity and Freedom. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Her writing and example are vitally enabling for young writers and readers; she traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement and patient experimentation with form, theme and language

At her death in 2020, Eavan Boland left a formidable body of work - poems and prose. Together hey transformed Irish poetry and had a considerable impact throughout the English-speaking world. She was also a major feminist thinker and essayist. She challenged and changed Irish culture and society. This collection of her most important essays combines autobiographical and critical reflections on the events and influences that shaped her life and work. It includes work never before collected, as well as draft chapters of the memoir, Daughter, that she was working on when she died. The book opens with substantial extracts from Object Lessons: the life of the woman and the poet in our times (1995), including 'Outside History' and 'The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma'. From A Journey with Two Maps: becoming a woman poet (2011) Jody Allen Randolph, her longtime friend and editor, selects the title essay and 'Becoming an Irish Poet', 'Domestic Violence' and the celebrated 'Letter to a Young Woman Poet'. The Uncollected Essays are full of surprises from each period of her life. The introduction tells the intertwined stories of her life and her writing, her sense of Ireland and exile, and her evolving insights into how the poet can earn, widen and share her freedoms. 'As time went on,' Randolph writes, 'Boland's prose grew clearer in focus and purpose; she argued that a poet's work is not just to write their poems, but also to contribute to the critique by which they will eventually be judged.'

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020. An Irish Times 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.

Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness."--Jane HirshfieldBuilding the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising.Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Building the Barricade is Anna Świrszczyńska's first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.Świrszczyńska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: "Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble."

The poems in Eavan Boland's new collection seek out the delicate intersections between generation, identity, and the deep losses inflicted by history on those who can bear them least. Exploring questions of inheritance (from mother to daughter, from generation to generation), the poems look closely at the ways in which we construct one another, and the ways in which - even without country, or settled identity - a legacy of connection and consolation can endure.

An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967 1987 confirmed Eavan Boland s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language."

Two poets, a playwright and a novelist - Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Frank McGuiness and Anita Desai - explore in these essays aspects of the imaginative process as each has experienced it: four major writers, four sensibilities, four ways of seeing creativity and its contexts. MICHAEL LONGLEY writes with remarkable candour of his years - 1970 to 1991 - as arts administrator in Northern Ireland. Transforming anecdote into parable, this noted poet measures the cost of 'trying to remain true to yourself facing the "dark tower"' while being part of an essential but often soul-destroying bureaucracy. EAVAN BOLAND, merging the personal and the theoretical, contends that the place of women as writers in Irish society have been shaped by a ' fusion of the national and the feminine'. FRANK MCGUINESS, the internationally acclaimed playwright, offers a radically innovative reading of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, while calling into being the material contexts of creativity - in this instance, a prison cell. The Indian novelist ANITA DESAI looks at her country's colonial heritage and a shared background that gave rise to the work of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the film-maker Satyajit Ray. Her fascinating lecture shows how a vibrant indigenous culture, coming into fruitful contact with the West at the end of the nineteenth century, blossomed into artistic creation - yielding parallels with Ireland.

What does it mean to be a writer in the context of a country's centuries of uncertainty and upheaval? How does an Irish writer define Irish writing? The writers here, who range from early legends like Yeats to modern masters like Roddy Doyle, address these questions through their sources: the land, the Church, the past, and changing politics and literary styles. The book begins with William Yeats and Augusta Gregory's dazzling meditations on the founding of the National Theatre as a venue for a new Irish imagination. Lady Gregory herself is the subject of pithy essays by Kate O'Brien and Colm Toibin. Poets discuss their peers -- Corkery on the Gaelic poets; Frank O'Connor on Corkery; O'Casey on Yeats; Roddy Doyle on Synge. Emma Donoghue illuminates the life of a lesbian Irish writer, while John Banville excoriates Bloomsday and "the pervasiveness and bathos of the Joyce myth." "Irish Writers on Writing" raises a toast to one of the world's most vital literary traditions.

New Selected Poems includes the key poems of Eavan Boland's career to date, from New Territory (1967) to Domestic Violence (2007), concluding with a selection of new poems. Developing her work through more than a dozen collections, Boland continues to find new dimensions in language, in history and in the body subject to passion and to time. Her critical writing, her poetry and her example have made an emancipating difference to writing in Ireland. As she remarked in an interview in 2000, 'women are now writing the Irish poem across a very big register of new tones, new subjects, new approaches...I think I was one of the poets who became convinced of the need for change.'

'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In "Object Lessons" Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose, the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as Wordsworth's "Prelude" does in his, though Boland does not allow herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in "Object Lessons", an enabling document of our time.Unease with Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it encounters.

In this radical anthology, the work of three of Ireland's most important and best-loved contemporary poets is featured. Each has, in a different way, cleared new creative space from which to speak and to sing. The anthology comprises an essential selection of some 40 pages from the work of the poets. Each contributes a short personal statement and a bibliography.

Published to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this book brings together many of Boland's best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. Through juxtaposition of text and image, place and memory, the book creates a unique portrait of the city: 'fragments', Boland says, 'can point at something accurately'. A Poet's Dublin also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph and a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the central role it has played in their lives and in their work.

They are nine women with much in common--all German speaking, all poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation that was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each provides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on language, place, poetry, and womanhood.

"After Every War" is a book of translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after World War II: Rose Auslander, Elisabeth Langgasser, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schuler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar Nick, and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish and, therefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest occasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as those of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the time--but with a difference. These poets see public events through the lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions, the bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost soul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which life is cruelly shattered. They reclaim these moments and draw the reader into them.

The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical notes on the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her interest in the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed the heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country. Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to present their poems for what they are: documentaries of resilience--of language, of music, and of the human spirit--in the hardest of times."

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. A "New York Times" Notable Book and a "Newsday" Favorite Book of 2001.

In The Lost Land, Eavan Boland "is intensely engaged with the ancient bardic lineage of her homeland, giving her poems an ineluctable moral gravity. . . . Her poems offer a curative gift of merciful vision to a country blinded by its own blood and pain, as her narrators wait more or less patiently in their 'difficult knowledge' for the healing of their country's wounds" (San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle).

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.