SOURCE: "Paroling Sweet Euphony," in Parnassus, Vol. 22, Nos. 1 and 2, 1997, pp. 223-46.

In the following review, Foy asserts that Boland's poems will stand "not on the politics that burdens and distinguishes them for now but on the hardihood of their afterlife as a lyrical voice."

Publicly, provocatively, and at length, Eavan Boland has ruminated on the issues that impel her poetry. These range from the Virgilian Latin, classical myths, and English poetry she learned in school to the "ordinary life" she stepped into as mother and wife in her beloved suburban Dublin. The burdens of this heritage come under her elegant scrutiny in the prose memoir Object Lessons, where we encounter the generous human perspectives that shape her work as well as the specifically Irish pressures—political and literary—that continue to inflect her voice. Behind and over all of these, however, looms a question as old as Plato...