Reviews for Lost Creeks: Collected Journals

The average rating for Lost Creeks: Collected Journals based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-29 00:00:00 Gene Storley [O]ver a relatively short time--certainly no more than a generation or two--women have moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them. It is a momentous transit. It is also a disruptive one. . . . What is more, such a transit . . . is almost invisible to the naked eye. Critics may well miss it or map it inaccurately. Eavan Boland crafts a luminous memoir in the form of literary criticism, examining the coming-of-age of an Irish woman poet. Beginning with the lonely, anonymous death of her maternal grandmother in a Dublin hospital at the age of thirty-one, Boland shows the silenced, the struggling, and finally, the emerging voice of the Irish woman. Object Lessons is a meditation on identity: what it means to be Irish, a notion Boland feels she missed, living her early childhood in London and New York, the daughter of a diplomat; what it means to be a poet, a calling Boland felt early, yet explored as an intellectual pursuit, rather than an emotional one; and what it means to be a woman, which becomes this book's ellipses. Boland was born into post-war Ireland, came of age in the paradigm-shifting 60s, and found herself a young wife and mother during Ireland's violent, turbulent 70s. Throughout it all, she circles in and around her national, artistic, and sexual identities, working to bring them together and give them voice through her poetry. She challenges the myth of the Irish poet and the objectification of the Irish woman as symbol of national identity, reduced to the role of crone or angel. Although Object Lessons is very specifically about the Irish cultural, political and domestic experience, it is a graceful treatise on poetry and feminism. She opens the door to the poets who influenced her thought, including Paula Meehan, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, and speaks with quiet authority about form and theme. The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I became. The wrath and grief of Irish history seemed to me, as it did to many, one of our true possessions. Women were part of that wrath, had endured that grief. It seemed to me a species of human insult that at the end of all, in certain Irish poems, they should become elements of style rather than aspects of truth. Having so recently read Lyndall Gordon's excellent Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft and of course, Virginia Woolf's incomparable A Room of One's Own I believe Boland's comment could extend to nearly any society at any age, including the present. And poetry could extend to prose, to politics, to the family. Eavan Boland's clear and lovely poetic voice translates well into her essay prose. This was a inspiring, perceptive read.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-24 00:00:00 Nuha Al Khalili Funnily enough, I don't particularly care for several of the poems that Boland is most famous for. However, this is one of those rare cases where the quotes on the outside of the book from reviewers are spot on...in particular, the one that mentioned "its serpentine strategy of memoir lifted into epiphany." How true! Take the care poets give to each word in a poem, and multiply that into a novel. Some of the prose is just fantastically beautiful. Of course, Boland's struggles with reconciling her gender's history as the object of Irish poetry with her own attempts to create new poetic objects is also incredibly interesting from a feminist standpoint. It always makes me hopeful to read about intelligent women who truly own their feminisms. Less stars because, sometimes, it is a little slow. I wished the parts where I felt absolutely engrossed in the beauty of her musings were closer together via some careful editing. Still, if you have any interest in feminism, poetry, or Ireland, a thought-provoking read.