"The Historians" by Eavan Boland (Carcanet, 2020)

Poems from The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, New Yorker, etc. At least 1.5 spacing - were the spacing more standard, many of the 2-page poems would lose a page.

The book starts well with "The Fire Gilder". A mother has told a child how she used to mix Gold and Mercury, then heated it to to coat a surface. The child then recalls "the part wishing plays in the way villages are made to vanish, in the way I learned to separate memory from knowledge, so one was volatile, one was not". Then the child recalls the mother saying "the only thing is it is extremely dangerous".

Stanza 3 of "The Light we lost" includes "Painted on glass/ inside the algebras/ of windows spaces they look down". I don't understand "algebras" in this context, and does "windows spaces" include a typo?

In "The lamplighter", the lamplighter is described as one who chooses what to show at night. Then "How often I long to lift/ my words high. How/ often nothing is raised/ and nothing brightens". Far too many line-breaks, though the content's good. The lamp-lighter, like the poet, is more curator than creator. In later poems -

• "light [is] the builder, light the maker" (p.25)
• "shadows building/ necessary blues/ to make dusk" (p.28)

Are painters any different? On p.38 the artist will "dip the brush again in azure,/ lowering the tip of it in window/ and yellow light and then wash/ the whole watercolour block with home"

In "Eviction" she combines Women and History again to little effect. This time there's no analogy to poetry, or to writing poetry. I can see how tempting it is to write articles about her common themes. Here are some quotes to get you started -

• "To stop memory becoming history./ To stop words healing what should not be healed" (p.17)
• "They lace their pages with fire. I finish writing." (p.17)
• "When I closed [your book] your poems would not stay put. They roamed the house. They saw my children sleeping" (p.21)
"All I know is/ some days/ should simply be. Not be remembered" (p.29)
• "I remember how I longed to find the plenitude and accuracy need to bring words home ... Now I wondow if it was enough ... to make us weep?" (p.55)

The line-breaks are so often without function that it's a surprise to see this first stanza from "This Garden"

Awake late at night what I see is faces, faces, their radiance. And realize I will never see them again. Then

In "Margin" there's another analogy. The poet reads that the hawk moth slows "its brain at the end of the day so as to see better in failing light". Then the poet walks out at dusk.

"Without End" and "Our future will become the past of other women" are tame.

Other reviews

• Nicholas Taylor-Collins (The titular poem, ‘The Historians’, also addresses these twin fears of an insufficiently accurate history and an inefficient poetic agency. ... he list of sixteen women in the poem—only ‘some of their names’—echoes Yeats’s ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, which was itself a return to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the sixteen executed leaders. ... This is neither deft politicking nor subtle poetics, but it is nonetheless necessary.)
• Susanna Lang (From the ocean’s movement and from mentors like Plath, Boland learned to write poems in which the events that shape our lives and our countries’ lives are gilded with fire and beauty and meaning)