SOURCE: "Sappho's Daughter," in American Book Review, Vol. 17, No. 5, June-July, 1996, p. 14.

In the following review, McFall discusses what Boland's An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems (1967–1987) reveals about the poet.

Eavan Boland's work caught my attention almost ten years ago when a friend sent me three pages xeroxed from The Journey and Other Poems, published by Carcanet, a book which established her poetic maturity and stature. I instantly liked the selection: "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951," "I Remember," "Fond Memory," and "Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland," because of the truthful voice I heard, ardent and wise, committed to form, but not shackled by it.

Boland has been publishing poems for thirty years; in the last decade, she has emerged not only as a premier Irish poet and critic (her recent Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in our Time attests to that), but...