SOURCE: Daniels, Kate. “Ireland's Best.” Southern Review 35, no. 2 (spring 1999): 387-93.

In the following excerpt, Daniels finds similarities between the poetry of Boland and Medbh McGuckian and differentiates the poetry of The Lost Land from Boland's earlier poetic work.

If one were to compose a scale of oppositions upon which to consider contemporary poetry by Irish women, the Dublin poet Eavan Boland (b. 1944) would appear at one end, and Medbh McGuckian (b. 1951), from Belfast, at the other. Although their work is fundamentally different—Boland the mistress of a highly cadenced, formalistic verse that favors “a lyric speech, a civil tone” (to use her own words), and McGuckian the wielder of nonlinear, surrealistic pieces—both women share a preoccupation with the liberation of Irish poetry from the historical grip of male readers and writers. As well, their work assaults on many levels the patriarchal assumptions engendered by the history of...