An Origin Like Water

by Eavan Boland

  Woman Turns Herself into a Fish, The, 126

  Women, The, 173

  Years ago I left the guest-house, 179

  Yeats in Civil War, 24

  Yesterday I knew no lullaby, 52

  You’re propped and swabbed and bedded, 195

  You rise, you dawn, 115

  PRAISE FOR EAVAN BOLAND

  “Eavan Boland is the real thing. I marvel at the skill and imagination

  behind these ravishing poems.” —James Merrill

  “Boland has emerged as one of the best poets in Ireland.”

  —Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books

  “Boland combines impeccable craft, resilient metaphors and, above all, moral

  authority to witness human difficulties.” —Jan Garden Castro, Nation

  “One of Ireland’s finest contemporary writers, as passionate and

  ambitious as Kenneally, as classical and meticulous as Heaney. . . . This

  is profound moving work from a poet at the height of her powers.”

  —Booklist (on In a Time of Violence)

  POETRY

  New Territory

  The War Horse

  Night Feed

  The Journey

  Selected Poems: 1989

  Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990

  In a Time of Violence

  The Lost Land

  PROSE

  Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and

  the Poet in Our Time

  EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1944 and is currently a professor of English at Stanford University. Her The Lost Land, In a Time of Violence, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, and Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990 are also available in paperback from Norton. She received a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry in 1994.

  Here is the collected early work, long unavailable in the United States, of one of our major poets. Comprising poems from Eavan Boland’s five early volumes—New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey—An Origin Like Water demonstrates now Boland’s mature voice has developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

  Copyright © 1996 by Eavan Boland

  All rights reserved

  Book design by JAM DESIGN

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Boland, Eavan

  An origin like water : collected poems, 1967–1987 / Eavan Boland.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. Ireland—Poetry. I Title.

  PR6052.035075 1996

  821′.914—dc20 95-19645

  ISBN 0-393-03852-1

  ISBN 978-0-393-31601-8

  ISBN 0-393-31601-7 pbk.

  ISBN 978-0-393-28573-4 (e-book)

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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