The First Book I Read in 2024

A thoughtful and enduring book of poems

Happy new year! I wanted to spend New Year’s Day reading a whole book from start to finish, so I decided to read something I’ve been meaning to read for a long time: A Woman Without a Country by Eavan Boland, one of our most important Irish women poets. I’m not surprised her writing is assigned to students in both the U.S. and Ireland. She was a teacher to some of my close friends, who were saddened to hear of her death in 2020. Years ago, one of them had recommended I read the opening poem of this collection, “The Lost Art of Letter Writing.” It is breathtaking and mysterious. Here is an excerpt:

…And if we say

An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew

By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?

As in letter-writing, so in reading — my first foray into Boland’s poetry is my attempt to stretch into the “unreachable distance” between my thoughts and hers.

Many of the poems are about the complicated feeling of returning to the country you came from after immigrating to the U.S. (in this case, Ireland). The book begins with a quote from Woolf as an epigraph: “…as a woman, I have no country.” This idea recurs throughout the book as she meditates on not quite feeling at home in the U.S. nor the Ireland she returns to after many years, as well as the way that the lives of ordinary women are often absent in historical and national narratives. She imagines the lives of her grandmother and mother, who was a painter, and she immortalizes them in a way that the societies in which they lived did not. Her poems about returning to Ireland show the evidence of a country that still deals with the aftermath of colonialism, economic recessions, and housing crashes. These material concerns are an essential part of the book, but so are more abstract ones — about love, language, art-making, and what is passed down (and lost) from generation to generation. I have many new favorites from this collection — in addition to the opening poem, a few of those new faves are “Eurydice Speaks,” “Rereading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ in a Changed Ireland,” and “Becoming Anne Bradstreet.”

What a great way to start off 2024!