Overview
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.
- | Author: Paula Meehan
- | Publisher: Dedalus Press
- | Publication Date: Nov 13, 2023
- | Number of Pages: 164 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Hardcover
- | ISBN-10: 1915629144
- | ISBN-13: 9781915629142
