Paula Meehan – författare

Painting Rain explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape a world. Hers is an ambitious meditation, from that point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet.The home, the city's heart, neglected suburban battlegrounds, all are shot through with visionary light. In poems of loss, hymns to the empty world, celebrations of people and place, Meehan confronts the darkness that everywhere threatens. These are poems that sustain belief in the power of language to reveal, interrogate and heal.

Published to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this book brings together many of Boland's best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. Through juxtaposition of text and image, place and memory, the book creates a unique portrait of the city: 'fragments', Boland says, 'can point at something accurately'. A Poet's Dublin also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph and a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the central role it has played in their lives and in their work.

"One of our most beloved contemporary poets", is how former Ireland Professor of Poetry Paula Meehan describes Philip Casey (1950-2018). Cherished by many for his tenderness, fortitude, hope and tenacity, Philip was an award-winning novelist, admired poet and vital presence on the Irish literary scene for four decades. Philip battled repeated health challenges, stood up for causes he believed in, and relished making mischief. He was, in the words of the poet Theo Dorgan, "some man for one man". Philip believed in the idea of a community of writers, and his open-mindedness drew others towards him - whether to his Dublin home, or to his grassroots support base in his earlier home of Hollyfort, Co Wexford. His booming laugh and powerful handshake were legendary. The many contributors, including Sebastian Barry, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Dermot Bolger, Moya Cannon and Thomas Lynch, praise Philip Casey's gifts as a writer of poetry and fiction, as well as highlighting their admiration for him as a man.

Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them is the third volume in UCD Press's The Poet's Chair series, publishing the public lectures of the Ireland Professors of Poetry. The Ireland Chair of Poetry was established in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is supported by Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaion. Michael Longley's and Harry Clifton's lectures were published in 2015. Paula Meehan's volume of The Poet's Chair meditates on poetry and mythology, geology and the environment, teachers and the lyric, bees and bears, genetics, memory, personal history, and much else. In three wide-ranging lectures she charts a contemporary poet's relationship with community (emblematised by bees), family (emblematised by bears), and selfhood (emblematised by water). Upon her appointment as the Ireland Professor of Poetry, Meehan was praised as a poet of solidarity, whose work upheld the dignity of the human spirit and skilfully blended a shared and personal history.Now at the end of her tenure, this illuminating volume of her writings as Chair gives a remarkable insight into the creative processes of a poet who has contributed so much to the craft of Irish poetry.

Poetry Book Society Special CommendationIn this radical anthology the work of three of Ireland's most important and best-loved contemporary poets is featured. Each has, in a different way, cleared new creative space to speak and to sing.The anthology makes an essential selection of some forty pages from the work of the poets. Each contributes a short personal statement, and there is a bibliography. Eavan Boland introduces the book with a major new essay.EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin in 1944. She studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She is Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. Her Carcanet books include Selected Poems, Collected Poems, The Lost Land, Code, and her prose book Object Lessons.PAULA MEEHAN was born in 1955 in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College and became a Writer Fellow of the English Department, and has taught in the United States. She has written plays and held a creative writing fellowship at University College, Dublin. She has worked with inner city communities and conducted workshops in prisons. Carcanet published Dharmakaya, her most recent book of poems, in 2000. The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994) were published by Gallery Press.MARY O'MALLEY, born in Galway in 1954, has travelled widely but returned to Ireland to become part of the Cuirt Festival committee. She is a member of the Poetry Council for Ireland. Her previous collections include Where the Rocks Float (1993), The Knife in the Wave (1997) and Asylum Road (2001) published by Salmon Poetry, and The Boning Hall (2002) published by Carcanet.