The internationally acclaimed Irish poet powerfully and movingly continues to merge private and mythic history. I imagine myself / at the landward rail of that boat / searching for the last sight of a hand. / I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land: / Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
The Lost Land in this magnificent volume is, in the poet’s words, not exactly a country and not entirely a state of mind … the lost land is not a place that can be subdivided into history, or love, or memory. It is the poet’s own, single, and private account of the ghostly territory where so much human experience comes to be stored.