Anyone familiar with contemporary Irish poetry or contemporary women's poetry -- heck, let's just say contemporary poetry -- will have encountered Eavan Boland's complex, dazzling poems. Her carefully wrought lyrics challenge readers to an act of attention to the smallest details of life, re-imagining these details until they move from the margins to the center of consciousness and meaning. On a meta level, her entire body of work is equally challenging of the "poetic past," complicating and subverting its traditional images of women, attitudes toward domesticity and master narratives of (Irish) nationhood.

"A Journey With Two Maps" (W.W. Norton, 274 pages, $26.95) documents Boland's process of "being and becoming" a poet.

The interlocked essays divide into three sections: Journeys, Maps and Destinations. The first centers on what Boland calls "a double vision": a creative tension between the conflicting claims of poetic tradition and resistance to that tradition, between the life authorized in poetry and the life lived in the suburbs. The opening essay tells how the chance discovery of a painting, created by her mother but signed by her mother's teacher ("His signature. Her painting. Her vision. His price.") complicates her own ideas about art, authority, communality and identity: "She had let him sign it. It was not the signature that shocked me; it was that consent."

Male teacher, woman painter/student -- the anecdote begs a feminist reading, which of course Boland acknowledges. But she does not stop there. Although the incident remains "disturbing and puzzling," it prompts an elaborate, nuanced meditation on creation and ownership in art and, more particularly, in poetry. Are poems created by an "I" or a "we"? The answer, Boland finds, is yes. Both.

The sketches of women poets in Section Two, Maps, are both biographical and interpretive. Nine poets, ranging from Anne Bradstreet to Gwendolyn Brooks, receive their own chapters; many more are discussed in other contexts. Boland's readings are brief, quirky and insightful, frequently sending me back to the originals with new eyes. I was particularly taken with her reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet I had generally discounted, though the last chapter, on translation, is also exceptionally fine.

The concluding section, Destinations, looks toward the future in "Letter to a Young Woman Poet." Pondering her beginnings in poetry, Boland sees a "remembered loneliness. The poets I knew were not women: the women I knew were not poets. The conversations I had, or wanted to have, were never complete." This letter is an attempt to reshape that past, to complete those conversations, if only fictively.

Although Boland calls this work a combination of "autobiography and analysis," readers looking for juicy personal details or gossip about literary circles will be sorely disappointed; "A Journey With Two Maps" is not memoir as we commonly think of it. Consider it rather a deeply personal form of literary criticism, a serious book, an eloquent book, for readers who believe, as Boland does, that poetry matters. A lot.

Patricia Hagen teaches English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth. She is the co-author of "Eavan Boland and the History of the Ordinary."