An essential volume by one of our most esteemed poets. “[Boland is] an original, dazzlingly gifted writer.... Uncompromising intellect, wry perception, and verbal brilliance.... A wonderfully elegant and sensual writer, keenly attuned to the pleasures of form and sound.... She's as musically gifted and as uncompromisingly intelligent as Seamus Heaney, and deserves comparable attention.” - David Walker, Field “[Boland] pursues an important, feminist revision of the history-making so often praised or inherited by MacNeice and Heaney. Not so much outside of history as counter to it, or in the process of amending it through addition, Boland has developed in her poetry what Harold Bloom might call an agonistic relationship with the paternal, natural, and often silencing history of traditional Irish poetry. . . . An attentive powerful, encouraging poet.”- David Baker, Kenyon Review