Another Dublin purchase/Irish author. My dad introduced me to Boland a few years ago.

As intense and personal as the work of Sharon Olds, these also have highly literary sensibilities and allusions, along the lines of Anne Carson (but perhaps more approachable for the lay person).

Not just because books of poetry tend to be slim, but also because poems reach further into you with each reading, I tend to not put a book of poetry on the list as “finished” until I’ve read it five or six times over a few days. These are poems I could read for months and not be done with.

From “Indoors”:
Find me a word for love. Make it damp. Sinuous companion,
knowing how to enter, settle in wood, salt the sheets
with cold, saying by this that we could never be
anything but an island people.

From “Letters to the Dead”:
How many daughters stood alone at a grave,
and thought this of their mothers’ lives?
That they were young in a country that hated a woman’s body.
That they grew old in a country that hated a woman’s body.