SOURCE: "The Woman as Icon, the Woman as Poet," in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 188-202.

In the following essay, Henry analyzes the connection between Boland's poetry collection, In a Time of Violence, and her collection of essays, An Origin Like Water, and complains that the two works repeat too many themes and are too focused on Boland herself.

In what appears to be a bid to be considered the woman Irish poet, Eavan Boland has recently published two volumes of poetry—In a Time of Violence and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987—and Object Lessons, a collection of essays subtitled "The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time." The poems and essays reveal a powerful intellect at work, though her intelligence can at times seem like calculated shrewdness, especially when we examine the poetry and prose together. These three books...