SOURCE: Thurston, Michael. “‘A Deliberate Collection of Cross Purposes’: Eavan Boland's Poetic Sequences.” Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4 (December 1999): 229-51.

In the following essay, Thurston offers a thematic and stylistic examination of Boland's longer poetic works.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Eavan Boland began to work not only in individual lyrics but in slightly longer poems (“The Journey”) and sequences of lyrics (including the poems gathered in In Her Own Image). Indeed, since the 1990 American appearance of Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, each of Boland's books has included at least one such sequence (Outside History included two, the title sequence and also “Domestic Interior,” which consisted of poems originally published as free-standing lyrics, first gathered into a titled sequence in this American publication). While they share the central concerns that have structured Boland's career, each sequence focuses its meditation through a different thematic lens. “Domestic Interior” elaborates and problematizes its...