Geomantic by Paula Meehan - Dedalus Press, poetry from Ireland and the world

By Paula Meehan

Geomantic

Comprising eighty-one poems of nine 9-syllable lines, Paula Meehan’s extraordinary new collection is both a controlled experiment with the challenge of form and, at once, a free meditation on the nature of memory, community, love and poetry itself. 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.

€12.50 – €22.50

All Poetry, Poetry from Ireland

Description

geomantic, a. and n.

(dʒiːəʊˈmæntɪk)

A. adj. Belonging to geomancy – (Greek: γεωμαντεία, “earth divination”) – a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand.

B. n. A geomancer. Obs.

***

Comprising eighty-one poems of nine 9-syllable lines, Paula Meehan’s extraordinary new collection is both a controlled experiment with the challenge of form and, at once, a free meditation on the nature of memory, community, love and poetry itself. 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.

The Moons

Moons like petals adrift on the stream:
night moon and day moon, moon in eclipse,
slender new moon in the winter sky,
and full harvest moon — a golden ball;
moon of my first breath, my mother’s death,
grandfather moon, my father’s frail boat,
moon of my lost child, my sister’s fall,
moon of my belovèd’s waking dream,
moons of my life adrift on the stream.

Additional information

Choose Edition

,

Product Detail

  • ISBN: : 9781910251157 PB / 9781910251164 HB
  • Size: : 140 x 215 mm
  • Pages: : 100
  • Published: : November 2016

About The Author

Author

PAULA MEEHAN is one of the best-known contemporary Irish poets. Born in 1955 in Dublin where she still lives, she studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the MFA programme at Eastern Washington University. Besides seven award-winning poetry collections she has also written plays for both adults and children. She has conducted residencies in universities, in prisons, in the wider community, and her poems and plays have been translated into many languages, including Irish. She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists and dancers, most recently with artist Dragana Jurišić in a book of photographs and poems, Museum, responding to No 14 Henrietta Street, the Dublin Tenement Museum. Paula Meehan's poetry collections in print include Dharmakaya and Painting Rain, from Carcanet Press, Manchester and from Wake Forest University Press, North Carolina. Geomantic, a long poem in 81 parts, published in 2016 by Dedalus Press, received a Cholmondelay Award for Poetry. Music for Dogs: Works for Radio, is also available from Dedalus Press. As If By Magic: Selected Poems, was published 1st of October, 2020, by Dedalus Press, and presents a generous offering of her poetry made in the last thirty years, including some of her most popular poems such as My Father Perceived as a Vision of St. Francis and The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks. From 2013 to 2016 Paula Meehan was Ireland Professor of Poetry and her lectures from the Chair, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, is published by UCD Press. A collection of critical essays on her poetry and plays, edited by Jody Allen Randolph, was published by the U.S. journal An Sionnach. It can be accessed here at Project MUSE. Paula Meehan's awards include the Butler Award of the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Laurence O’Shaughnessy Award, the Denis Devlin Award and the Marten Toonder Award.

Related products