Dissecting the Heart

The subjects themselves in Rosita Boland's recent poems attest to her book's distinctive quality: a series of museum and gallery exhibits, the falconer's art, an astronaut's wife, the savage regime in Teheran and the unexpected places where love can be located, lost, and rediscovered. Above all, the author is interested in vital processes. The collection, fuelled by scientific enquiry and imaginative curiosity, includes brief histories of our understanding of the human heart and brain. In sequences and shorter lyrics, poems waited for and patiently assembled, Rosita Boland's lambent lines and stanzas extend the range of contemporary Irish poetry.