In the excellent title sequence, Boland explores the movement of women from myth to history, evoking the painful awareness implicit in any move toward self-determination: ``Out of myth into / history I move to be / part of that ordeal / whose darkness is / only now reaching me from the field.'' Her sharpened skill with language, rhythm and form permeates each poem in a collection that is a delight to ear and mind. The theme of both the creative and the imprisoning power of myth recurs throughout. 1 Eavan Boland, Object Lessons, The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, New York, Norton, 19 1 My poem wants to unsay the cadences and certainties of one kind of Irishness1, Eavan Boland states in Turning Away, the fifth essay of Object Lessons, published in 1994. in a room white and quiet as a mortuary,'' she exposes the inner vitality of her subject by evoking the exterior. In ``Woman in Kitchen,''sic where the ``tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes / the round lunar window of the washer /. Through close attention to the specific details of women's domestic lives, she transcends minutiae and gives shape to the larger emotions and truths of those lives. With this volume Boland, an Irish poet, establishes herself as an important voice in contemporary poetry.
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