3/5 stars

What's it about? In her final collection, Eavan Boland returns to women’s histories, craft, and country.

How’d I find it? Praise be a Saturday browse at Powell’s.

Who will enjoy this book? If you’ve never read Eavan Boland and delight in Seamus Heaney, you’re in for a treat.

What stood out? Narrative poems and ars poeticas populate The Historians, with one section made up of a piece commissioned for the 100th anniversary of Irish women’s suffrage. Boland sure knows how to devise a turn in a poem.

Which line made me feel something? From “The Fire Gilder,” which opens the book: “My subject is the part wishing plays in / the way villages are made / to vanish, in the way I learned / to separate memory from knowledge, / so one was volatile, one was not”