Paula Meehan – författare

Paula Meehan’s Mysteries of the Home gathers into a single volume a selection of poems from her two seminal mid-career collections, The Man who was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994), both of which received considerable praise from critics and readers alike.

Comprising eighty-one poems 9-syllable 9-line poems, Paula Meehan’s extraordinary new collection explores the subjects of loss, return, memory and the power of art, in which the linked but not strictly sequential poems act like tarot cards or i ching hexagrams, providing moments of clarity and insight during “the long night’s journey into day”. “The craft,” as one poem  observes of a glider riding a thermal,“is lighter than the learning”. In that sense Geomantic is a significant new departure and a major achievement.

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin where she still lives. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Eastern Washington University in the U.S. This is her seventh collection of poems. She has written plays for both adults and children, including Cell and The Wolf of Winter. Music for Dogs: work for radio, also published by Dedalus Press, collects three plays concerned with suicide during the economic boom years in Ireland. Her poetry has been translated into French, German, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Estonian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Irish. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award for Dharmakaya, published in 2000, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2015, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. In 2013 Dedalus Press republished Mysteries of the Home, a selection of seminal poems from the 1980s and the 1990s. She was honoured with election to Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, in 1996. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013 – 2016, and her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016.

This Selected Poems gathers together workpublished between 1991 and 2016 from collections that have been lauded, awarded and widely translated, collections that have gained a large audience and a considerable reputation, nationally and internationally, for one of Ireland’s foremostpoets and most distinctive voices.A great deal has changed in the world in the arc of time covered by these poems, and those changes are noted and considered by poems that are remarkable for their clear-eyed witness. Meehan’s devotion to, and mastery of, her craft, has always been one of the key signatures of her work, as has been her immersion in her beloved native Dublin. In her Selected Poems we see this and more — heruncompromising engagement with the politics of gender and class, her love of the natural world and her grief at what threatens it, her holistic and visionary impulse to bless the creation, to be grateful for her place in it.

Patterns and patterning - cellular, celestial, social, political and personal - spin and weave through Paula Meehan's new collection of poems. From the mythic to the mundane, her attention is given over to the examination of interconnected lives - her own, the lives of her family, the human ecology of her native Dublin - and the unfolding of pattern-cycles in the non- human world.

Meehan's familiar impulse towards blessing and empathy is shadowed in these poems with a clear-sighted understanding that the human perspective is neither privileged nor superior, an awareness that much if not most of existence is indifferent to our all-too-human dramas. Nevertheless, explorations of family, of her own mortality, of the lives of long-dead tenement dwellers, shift and shine in a web of stories that speak to a stubborn human endurance that is sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic - and occasionally transcendent.

As well as new poems, this collection integrates Museum (2019), a sequence commissioned for the Dublin Tenement Museum, and For the Hungry Ghosts (2022), a poem cycle responding to the Hades episode of Joyce's Ulysses.