A Journey With Two Maps Becoming A Woman Poet

“Boland offers encouragement to women poets of the future. . . . Her vivid imagery will beguile many.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review These inspiring essays from the celebrated poet Eavan Boland are both critical and deeply personal, revealing the adventure, passion, and struggle of becoming a woman poet. In this thematic sequel to her classic Object Lessons, Boland traces her own experiences as a woman, wife, and mother and their effect on her poetry, and she looks to a world where she can change the poetic past as well as the present.

Poet, traveller, artist, and mystic - the story of one extraordinary woman's many lives.

The sixteenth volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series, and Patrick O'Brian's first bestseller in the United States. At the outset of this adventure filled with disaster and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pursue an American privateer through the Great South Sea. The strange color of the ocean reminds Stephen of Homer's famous description, and portends an underwater volcanic eruption that will create a new island overnight and leave an indelible impression on the reader's imagination. Their ship, the Surprise, is now also a privateer, the better to escape diplomatic complications from Stephen's mission, which is to ignite the revolutionary tinder of South America. Jack will survive a desperate open boat journey and come face to face with his illegitimate black son; Stephen, caught up in the aftermath of his failed coup, will flee for his life into the high, frozen wastes of the Andes; and Patrick O'Brian's brilliantly detailed narrative will reunite them at last in a breathtaking chase through stormy seas and icebergs south of Cape Horn, where the hunters suddenly become the hunted.

In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. 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.

Abandoned in the jungle of the Nepalese Borderlands, two-year-old Nandu is found living under the protective watch of a pack of wild dogs. From his mysterious beginnings, fate delivers him to the King's elephant stable, where he is raised by unlikely parents-the wise head of the stable, Subba-sahib, and Devi Kali, a fierce and affectionate female elephant. When the king's government threatens to close the stable, Nandu, now twelve, searches for a way to save his family and community. A risky plan could be the answer. But to succeed, they'll need a great tusker. The future is in Nandu's hands as he sets out to find a bull elephant and bring him back to the Borderlands. In simple poetic prose, author Eric Dinerstein brings to life Nepal's breathtaking jungle wildlife and rural culture, as seen through the eyes of a young outcast, struggling to find his place in the world.

Eavan Boland's new collection turns to the domestic interiors in which the dramas of women's lives are played out: seductions and quarrels, anger and grief, the care of children. In her attentiveness to the humdrum realities of suburban life, Boland makes them luminous with the power of live myths. Looking back over her own life, back through the lives of the women who preceded her, Boland arrives at the deep structures of memory where, as she writes, legends are made new 'not by saying them, but by unsettling / one layer of meaning from another'. This is a collection from a poet at the height of her powers, writing with authority and grace.

In Sally Thomas’s Motherland, the poet keenly observes the ephemeral and the everlasting in the lens of time-the daily into seasonal transformations, the gifts and wonders of nature and people. Motherland by turns hails and interrogates in matters of flesh, of faith and spirituality-especially so in the “Richeldis of Walsingham” poem sequence. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a collection abounding in insight, hope, grace, surprises, and yes, love. PRAISE FOR MOTHERLAND: A core of spiritual knowledge resides in the poems of Sally Thomas’s Motherland- knowledge that might seem strange to the poet herself, in fact, though it definitely resides in her, and radiates throughout this collection. Motherland is the perfect title, since the poet, herself a mother, regards all her human occupations as native and yet mysterious, occurring in a place which is both foreign and familiar. The final sequence, on Richeldis of Walsingham, includes lines that describe the expression of that knowledge, as “the eloquence/ Of the small river moving always forward to the unseen/ Sea.” Motherland is a book of the presence-radiant, benevolent, challenging-for which there is often no word, except as we find in poetry, like the poetry of Sally Thomas.” -Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry The poems of Sally Thomas are poems in which the act of looking at the world in all its depth and complexity is just about as close as possible to being fully realized in the corresponding “world” of poetic language and form. And the verses are compelling because in every line something is at stake: our very understanding of creation, the human condition, and the mystery of thought and its language that link us, however imperfectly, to what may be called the given world. As Thomas says in “Frost,” “Tricky winter light and my own eye/ Bend the world, if not to beauty, then/ To strangeness.” -David Middleton (from the foreword), author of The Fiddler of Driskill Hill In her most recent collection of poems, Motherland, Sally Thomas gives us a world we live in but, alas, too often don’t seem to see. So much is lost, these poems tell us, even as they manage to reinstate and re-imagine these losses for us. All poetry is elegiac, even as it can, in the hands of a serious poet, celebrate the very world which for all of us keeps slipping away in the great wheel of time. Then too there is her mastery of poetic form-among these the sonnet, the villanelle, the couplet, and her unparalleled command of rhyme and slant rhyme. What a delight to discover a poet who has found a way to allow the sacred and the sacramental inform her poems in a surprising range of contemporary idioms. -Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sally Thomas was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1964, and was educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of Memphis, and the University of Utah. She spent some years living in the American West and in Great Britain before settling in North Carolina, her current home. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water (2015) and Richeldis of Walsingham (2016), both from Finishing Line Press. Over the last two decades, her poetry and fiction have appeared in Dappled Things, First Things, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Southern Poetry Review, the New Yorker, the Rialto, and other journals in the United States and Great Britain.

‘This book makes an important intervention into debates about influence and contemporary Irish poetry. Supported throughout by incisive reflections upon allusion, word choice, and formal structure, Keating brings to the discussion a range of new and lesser known voices which decisively complicate and illuminate its pronounced concerns with inheritance, history, and the Irish poetic canon.’ — Steven Matthews, Professor of English Literature, University of Reading, UK, and author of Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation and Yeats As Precursor This book is about the way that contemporary Irish poetry is dominated and shaped by criticism. It argues that critical practices tend to construct reductive, singular and static understandings of poetic texts, identities, careers, and maps of the development of modern Irish poetry. This study challenges the attempt present within such criticism to arrest, stabilize, and diffuse the threat multiple alternative histories and understandings of texts would pose to the formation of any singular pyramidal canon. Offered here are detailed close readings of the recent work of some of the most established and high-profile Irish poets, such as Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, along with emerging poets, to foreground an alternative critical methodology which undermines the traditional canonical pursuit of singular meaning and definition through embracing the troubling indeterminacy and multiplicity to be found within contemporary Irish poetry.