Code

by Eavan Boland

This collection of Eavan Boland's poetry explores the historical, the domestic, cultural and female identity.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). Her poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She was married to the novelist Kevin Casey.

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The "marriage" section of this was good but not great, but the second half of the book (the "Code" section) was really fantastic. I love her obsession with marrying nature imagery with all the atrocities that took place on a given land.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in the US as Against Love Poetry this is an intelligent and considered series of poems. The first section is about Boland's thirty years' marriage, and celebrates love as something ordinary, every day, and mundane, rather than traditional poems of courtly love. They range from being detached to being very moving, such as the famous poem, "Quarantine," about the Irish famine. The second half includes poems about violence writing itself onto the landscape, history, the experience of being an Irish immigrant, and the title poem, "Code", which is a surprising, thought-provoking and beautiful poem about the American computer-programmer, Grace Murray Hopper. A strong collection from a poet at the height of her powers.