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brittbat 's review for:
A Woman Without a Country: Poems
by Eavan Boland
13
A subject people knows this.
The first loss is through history.
The final one is through language.
14
It is time to go back to where I came from.
--Rereading Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village in a Changed Ireland
I bought my copy of A Woman Without a Country on a work trip about five years ago, and I selected it the way I select most poetry books: the cover caught my eye, the title caught my ear, and at least one line while flipping through caught my heart. And then it sat on my shelf for years until I decided 2023 was the year I would read a poetry book each month, and November was the month for this one.
It feels like the appropriate time to have read it. Though I knew nothing about the subject matter when I bought it, the poems are concerned with the Irish diaspora and its associated losses, colonialism, the way that eroded history and language fallen into disuse (or forced into it) result in a loss of identity. It strikes a similar mood as "Butchered Tongue" on Hozier's Unreal Unearth, an album I've been listening to a lot since its release this year. I like how these two unrelated works can extend a hand to one another in my mind.
A subject people knows this.
The first loss is through history.
The final one is through language.
14
It is time to go back to where I came from.
--Rereading Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village in a Changed Ireland
I bought my copy of A Woman Without a Country on a work trip about five years ago, and I selected it the way I select most poetry books: the cover caught my eye, the title caught my ear, and at least one line while flipping through caught my heart. And then it sat on my shelf for years until I decided 2023 was the year I would read a poetry book each month, and November was the month for this one.
It feels like the appropriate time to have read it. Though I knew nothing about the subject matter when I bought it, the poems are concerned with the Irish diaspora and its associated losses, colonialism, the way that eroded history and language fallen into disuse (or forced into it) result in a loss of identity. It strikes a similar mood as "Butchered Tongue" on Hozier's Unreal Unearth, an album I've been listening to a lot since its release this year. I like how these two unrelated works can extend a hand to one another in my mind.