This book has meant more to me than any book of poetry I have read in a very long time. Harriet Levin writes poems that I can relate to, that move me, that help me to reflect on my own life. She captures the conflicts and tensions of adolescence, family relationships, and love. When you read these poems you will hear her lines echoing in your head for days. You will want to read this beautiful and powerful book again and again.

This collection, like Outside History, paints the feminine landscape with an unexpected strength. Her poems inspire me with their music and their accurate depiction of the conflicting feelings that the roles of mother, woman and artist/individual can produce. Boland, like Plath, creates myth from the familiar and reveals both the power and vulnerability of womanhood.

My favorite poem is The Pomegranate, which I think should be required reading for any would-be mother, the mother of a daughter and/or a teen. When I heard Boland read this poem aloud, I was moved to tears.

She is often compared to Heaney--not just because they're both Irish (I hope), but because her talent for controlling and using language is matched only by his.

I cannot praise this work or this poet highly enough.

Eavan Boland's early work is collected here. This volume, then, can be read as a progression through a life as a woman and a poet. Her poetry speaks to the everyday human concerns. It also grapples with political issues and personal consequences. If you have not read Boland's work, you should. She is a major voice in Irish literature and in contemporary poetry and deserves recogintion among the best. This volume allows you to see how her work has evolved. Once you read this, I urge you too look at In a Time of Violence, her most recent poetry collection. Also, her memoir, Object Lessons, is a must read for every woman poet today and a good read for anyone interested in poiltics, poetry, Ireland, or womanhood. Boland is also a wonderfully generous person and teacher

Boland addresses the struggles of a poetess finding her voice in a society which seems to lack a place for her. Through seemingly circular reasoning, she approaches, considers, defines, and returns to consider the significance of the events of Ireland and the writing of others in her own unique and powerful voice. An enchanting read that reminds women of their own experiences while addressing the dichotomy that keeps them separate.

I first read Eavan Boland in an Irish literature class in college. Her writing is magical, lyrical, ethereal and forces you realize the power of identity, language, culture.

Not just for Irish literature fans, but anyone who enjoys beautiful prose.

If you're interested in reading Boland, this is the book to get. Here you see a genuine artist grimly struggling with the details of her craft and often managing to say the true and difficult thing. Something terrible happens in the later books, I'm afraid, in which Boland develops possibly the worst case of complacency and hubris in contemporary poetry. It's almost as if she loses all faith in language and stakes her claim entirely on the basis of sociology, on being "an important voice" that must be heard. There are just too many other voices out there who are still struggling with their art, who have not yet succumbed to vanity and cashing in on the benefits of being an overstuffed "public" poet (facilitated by the academy, unfortunately, with their fat endowed chairs and inflated reading fees) to seriously accept the later books along with the grand claims Boland demands for them. This book, though, gives hints of what might have been.

Eavan Boland, with her words of flowing lyric, succeeds at giving the lives of women a place in poetry, and myth a voice. This anthology is practically a catalog of her growth as a poet. Her poetic talent makes for a comforting read. You can feel yourself ascending from hell with Sappho in "The Journey." It is a must read for those who appreciate contemporary poetry or women's issues.

This is a flat and formulaic book from a writer churning out a sort of postcolonialism by numbers, smugly confident of her direct line to the hidden truths about Irish history. This hidden truth about Irish history seems to be, surprise surprise, that it culminates in the poetry of Eavan Boland. Boland was already overrated in comparison to many of her Irish contemporaries, but this is easily her worst book to date.

Having opened the book with some prejudice--the scorn charged by college students to an assigned book--I was caught off-guard, and taken. The poetry is exquisite, and the sounds are hypnotizing. It is easily digested. Easily, one of the best I've read.

These poems are set in Ireland but the author covers a multitude of themes: relationships, growing up, the role of women in society.

I had the pleasure of listening to Eavan Boland at the Des Moines poetry fest last week. When she read the last stanza of "the necessity of irony," about separation from her daughter, there was a collective gasp from the audience at the import of her words and the way she brought us to them via the poem.

A powerful but accessible collection.

Several times I was tempted to drop this book of poetry - the poems are well crafted and build on a dark, grimy side of the steel industry. Nothing about them set them apart from the general heap of grimy, lyrical, contemporary poetry. Nothing made them universal.

However, the last section of the book breaks forth with several excellent poems - the title poem "The Origins of Evening" is an exploration of death written for the author's uncle. "The Closet" is a delightful piece of letting one's life trap you ...

If your background resonates with the Pittsburgh steel mill environment, some of the earlier poems may speak to you. But most of the final poems should speak to any lover of contemporary poetry.

This book of poetry has a strong imagery and narrative, telling the stories of Pittsburgh and its depths. However, don't let Pittsburgh be misleading to the true themes: memory and darkness. The poems are honest, with a precise and not-too-wordy language that would block their strength. An example in "Home" from "A Connection to the Dark." "And in a voice hard as her fingers/ says 'Your dinner's in the oven/ getting cold.' Home is where/ Such scenes seemed to linger,/ Where you lost the first fears/ Of dying or being orphaned." I recommend this book to people who are starting to explore Contemporary American poetry, or people who are in the kingdom. I've read this book three times and from it at Open-Mic nights; it didn't win the National Poetry Series award for nothing (as the catch phrase goes). Its strengths go beyond their words and are as elusive as night.

There is definitely a need for such books on poetic forms today, but this book does not fill that lacuna adequately. As has been noted, the editors are not poets of the first rank (despite the fact that Mark Strand was a poet laureate of the US) and are not unquestionable masters of form. So, while this book may serve a scant few beginners, there remain better other options.

I would suggest checking out John Hollander's excellent short work "Rhyme's Reason". He goes over more forms and in a better style than in this book. If you are a poet yourself, definitely you should choose Hollander's book over this one. However, if you want an easy and light read, maybe this book is better, since it provides longer "readings" of certain poems. But if that's what you're after, you'd be better served by Harold Bloom's "How to Read and Why", a very good book written by a top scholar and yet readable by virtually anyone interested in literature.

These two poets rarely write in poetic form themselves, and it shows. The book is sketchy and often superficial in its treatments of the forms. For a much more thorough look at a much wider range of forms, check out the new book AN EXALTATION OF FORMS: CONTEMPORARY POETS CELEBRATE THE DIVERSITY OF THEIR ART.

The choice of poems in this book is great, the design is beautiful and it can sure be very helpful for anyone who loves poetry. Just the best.

I love the idea of memorizing one hundred great poems; to carry around in your head always, ready for any situation.

Unfortunately, "Committed to Memory" is not a big help with such a project. The subtitle, "100 Best Poems to Memorize" is misleading, because for every good choice (like Byron's "So We'll Go No More A' Roving") there are at least two no-so-great ones ("Lord Randall" and "The Owl and the Pussycat") and a few selections are downright inexplicable (Why would anyone want to memorize "The Song of the Mad Prince"?). An ideal poem for memorization should combine deep meaning with a strong rhyme, making it easier to burn into your mind. "A Mending Wall", by Robert Frost, while a great poem, in my mind is just too hard to memorize. "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" would have been a better Frost choice. Tennyson's "Ulysses" is just way too long, and other selections suffer from plain old mediocrity. The only truly excellent choice here in my view is actually the first one, Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet". It's down hill from there.

In conclusion, if you really want to memorize one hundred wonderful poems I recommend just checking out "Committed to Memory" from the library, gleaning what you can, and then buying "Poems to Read", by the Favorite Poem Project; a terrific anthology that has at least fifty poems well worth committing to memory. As for "Committed to Memory"; it's strictly rental quality.

GRADE: C

If the readers intention is to play a game of memory then this selection of poems can play the trick. But if your expectation is to have a first-rate selection of poems, then this book will run short of your objective.

Several years ago, upon learning that a certain young woman enjoyed the poetry of Robert Frost, I began to memorize some of Frost's poetry. While this effort to impress her did not produce the desired outcome, it did introduce me to the pleasurable experience of memorizing poetry. I found that the act of committing a poem to memory brought out many of the poem's subtleties that I missed on previous readings. It's been quite a while since I've seen the lady who inspired my efforts at memorizing poetry, but I still enjoy coming to a closer understanding of a poem through memorization.

It's hard for any poetry fan to take someone else's list of the "100 best" without balking at some of the choices, and I certainly had some question concerning many of the poems included in the anthology. On the whole, however, I enjoyed the collection, and found some new insight into some old poems.

I was a great admirer of Ms. Boland's early poems, though what struck me as bold and innovative and fresh in that work has become (or so it seems to me) a sort of tired rhetorical posturing, and a sort of frumpy stylistic manner. Her early authority seems feigned now, and I personally find it hard to account for the flatness and airiness of the poems themselves. I should add that I say all this with a sinking heart, as I had very high hopes for her career.

In this most pretentiously titled book, Boland continues to ask us to believe that she speaks for women everywhere and that she has something significant to say about Irish history and politics. It's no accident that she teaches and lives in America--in Ireland we're having none of her. Here she is deeply unpopular, especially among the younger generation of female poets who look to more innovative writers for their models. The problem is that Boland shamelessly courts the establishment with her predictable and traditionalist domestic (domesticated) verse while at the same time striking psuedo-revolutionary academic postures. The poems themselves are flat, frightened and derivative. This is very poor work indeed.

Eavan Boland has made a lasting contribution to modern poetry in English. Her earlier volumes, excluding The Lost Land, explored themes of domesticity, women's creativity, and Irish nationalism in language both lyrical and tough-minded. Her latest collection seems flat and uninspired, as if she is imitating herself. As if she is thinking too much about what she wants to say and not letting her own poetic voice lead the way. Could the problem be that she is now spending too much time in the U.S. as a tenured academic at Stanford? Whatever the cause, I hope she returns to her earlier passion and power.