Mary O'Malley

Eavan Boland

Paula Meehan

Three Irish Poets

Pillow Talk

Meehan explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. 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.

Painting Rain

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.

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."

Dharmakaya

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.

Paula Meehan

Books

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