By Paula Meehan

The Solace of Artemis

The Solace of Artemis by Paula Meehan. 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.

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The Solace of Artemis by Paula Meehan.

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.

“Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing—a vocational poet of courage and integrity.” — Carol Ann Duffy

The Solace of Artemis
13 November 2023
162 pp. 140 x 216 mm
ISBN 9781915629159 paperback, €14.50
ISBN 9781915629159 paperback, €25

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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.

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