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This Selected Poems gathers together work published 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 foremost poets 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 -- her uncompromising 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.
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.
Composed of eighty-one nine-line poems, Meehan's extraordinary new collection is at once a free-form dance and a controlled meditation on the nature of memory, community, love, and poetry itself. Her celebration of the power of dream and of song is neither escape nor hermetic retreat but a means to navigate "the long night's journey into day." A true citizen poet, Meehan begins her work in intimate feeling but is always focused on the world.
Mysteries of the Home gathers into a single volume a selection of poems from Paula Meehan's two seminal mid-career collections, The Man who was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994), both of which won considerable praise from critics and readers alike. Included here are some of her best-known and best-loved poems - 'The Pattern', 'The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks', 'My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis' and 'The Wounded Child' among them. They show an artist at the height of her powers producing work of "remarkable candour and ... stunning lyricism" (The Colby Quarterly). Paula Meehan was born in 1955 in Dublin where she still lives. Besides six collections of poems, the most recent of which are Dharmakaya (2000) and Painting Rain (2009), she has also written plays for both adults and children and conducted residencies in universities, in prisons and in the wider community. Paula Meehan is a member of Aosdana and the recipient of a number of awards, including the Marten Toonder Award for Literature in 1995 and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award in 2001."
In Dharmakaya, Paula Meehan's fifth collection, the poems move between the timeless, unsituated spirit and its truths, and the living anguish and desire of a dying body that keenly feels its femaleness in an Ireland that is both haunted and hard-wired. "Dharmakaya," a word she borrows from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, signals the span of the collection's philosophical concerns: a dialogue between western poetics and Buddhism. Her formal concerns as a poet are enacted in gestures both received and open, drawing alike from her tradition and the disruption of that tradition.
The third book of poems by Meehan, who lives in Dublin, Ireland.
"The public world is pitched against the private in measured interrogations. The 'pillow' of the book's title might suggest poems of intimacy, but the poems themselves subvert such expectation. These are poems of hope and love and loss and courage, everywhere informed by a sense of the care with which we must encode and decode our meanings."--
A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This impo...
In a volume that has become a standard text in Irish studies and serves as a course-friendly alternative to the Field Day anthology, editors Maureen O’Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including Old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish folksongs, and drama. For each author the editors provide a biographical sketch, a brief discussion of how his or her selections relate to a larger body of work, and a selected bibliography. In addition, this new volume includes a larger sampling of women writers.
In 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 from which to speak and to sing. The anthology comprises an essential selection of some 40 pages from the work of the poet