SOURCE: Ward, David C. “A Certain Slant of Light.” P.N. Review 25, no. 3 (January-February 1999): 66-8.

In the following review, Ward considers the place of The Lost Land within Boland's poetic oeuvre and deems the collection to be Boland's return to political concerns.

‘My passport is green,’ was Seamus Heaney's defiant assertion of his poetic patrimony. Heaney's confident nationalism has never been shared by his compatriot Eavan Boland. Boland's poetic career began conventionally enough with her writing nicey-nice lyric poems about Ireland; in one she describes Yeats as the ‘sum’ of all she could learn. But writing poems called ‘Elegy for a Youth Changed to a Swan’ soon palled for a poet as preternaturally aware as Eavan Boland and, at least in retrospect, they must seem to her like the poetic equivalent of foot binding. Growingly conscious of her double colonization as both Irish and a woman, Boland used...