Jessa lent me this book years and years ago. I picked it up this summer as I suspected it might be on the short list of books she would want to take with her to Germany -- she's mentioned Boland a few times as an author whose work it is difficult to find in the United States.

Anyway, I enjoyed this poetry well enough, Boland is clearly a very accomplished writer. However, I felt that I was really missing most of it. Much of Boland's earlier poems were based heavily on mythology and traditional stories that were largely unfamiliar to me. (Darn my lack of a classical education!) Then later poems were informed by the history of Irish-English conflicts, which really I just know nothing about at all.

There were quite a number of poems more generally on womanhood, motherhood and relationships. Those, of course, I could relate to, and were lovely, some biting, and all very intelligent and skillful. But it's easy to see why Jessa, with her interest in mythology and Irish history, would get a lot more out of this collection than me. ( )