The Irish poet died in 2020, leaving her work as a coronavirus companion. Meditations on the Peep o' Day Boys and the Great Famine from In a Time of Violence are reminders of how we bind our wounds and compulsively pick at the scars.

This anthology brings together dozens of poems from across four decades of Eavan Boland's career. As is to be expected with such a diverse collection, many of Boland's poems here don't quite work for me—particularly the earlier ones where she's struggling to find an independent voice, and some of the later ones, where she seems to become constrained by the expectations she seems to feel that her public persona places on her—and I sometimes get frustrated with Boland's tendency to opt for the blunt anvil of the sentence fragment when a subtler tool would have worked better. But when the poems are good, they're great, and returning to some I first encountered as a teenager I can see again the beginnings of my own grapplings with feminism, history, myth and colonialism. ( )