Map of Love

AGAINST LOVE POETRY

By Eavan Boland.

53 pp. New York:

W. W. Norton & Company. $21.

By way of explaining one of her recent poems, ''That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,'' Eavan Boland wrote last year that she remained connected to this poem -- a philosophical measure of how little official documents tell us about humanity -- because it represented to her ''a small diagram of an argument most poets enter at some stage or another: who makes the destination, who marks the way, where is authority and who will contest it?''

She also says that the project of analyzing one's own work is ''inherently unreliable,'' but her attempt at it is anything but. What Boland claims as the subtext of this poem embodies the set of urgent questions that have occupied her for most of her more than 30-year career, questions she has answered with a voice that is by now famous for its unwavering feminism as well as its devotion to both the joys of domesticity and her native Ireland.

All three strains are in fine evidence in Boland's new book of poetry, her 10th, which argues by example that the sweet, swooning verse we've come to associate with the phrase ''love poetry'' is not the real thing at all. That kind of verse, she writes in the title poem, ''can do no justice to . . . the contradictions of a daily love.'' (''Against Love Poetry'' is the only prose poem in the collection, perhaps because it's meant as a statement of purpose and thus Boland wanted it to look weighty on the page -- otherwise it seems a fairly arbitrary choice.)

Boland returns to the enduring battle between love and control many times in the first half of this collection. ''We are married thirty years, / woman and man,'' she writes to her husband in ''The Pinhole Camera,'' ''Long enough / to know about power and nature. / Long enough / to know which is which.'' Elsewhere she tells the story of a couple found dead during the potato famine and finds in their final position -- her feet held close to his chest for warmth -- an indicator of ''How they lived. / And what there is between a man and a woman. / And in which darkness it can best be proved.''