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Rating: 
Summary: Shocking
Review: "The Lost Land" stands out from Boland's previous collections for its precise, cutting indictments of the colonists and the repression in Irish history. The poem "The Necessity For Irony" shocked me as well, and other poems such as "Heroic" voiced those nagging feminist desires to be heroic and triumphant. In all, a complex and divining collection that rings with meaning (for women, and for poets, at least) that has trouble with the short, dense sentences that can bore after awhile.
Rating: 
Summary: These are wonderful poems!
Review: //The poems in The Lost Land trace the history of Ireland from the time "after the wolves and before the elms" to the present. In addition, some of the poems are also about language, i.e. the effect of the imposition of English on the Irish and the idea that the words we speak today contain the memory of other languages. "That is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this" ("A Habitable Grief", at p. 32 of The Lost Land,) "What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open" ("Witness" at p. 18 of The Lost Land) As always, wonderful poems from Eavan Boland.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit too self-important?
Review: While Ms. Boland's early poems were filled with a kind of daring and surprise, this latest book seems to have settled for the mock-solemnities of someone who believes she has "arrived." What once was spark now is ash, what once was passionate engagement now is yawning piety. One wishes her writing life weren't quite so settled.
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