The Historians: Poems

Acclaimed poet Eavan Boland has been praised for her “edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history” (J. D. McClatchy)—all on display in The Historians. Here Boland returns to her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased, stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past. Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother’s parable to her daughter. These narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.