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.
The formal gathering, the ‘ravelling and unravelling’ of Meehan’s key commissioned works makes them anew in this collection; this imperative and urgent book is important for our times and emphatically assures her position as the nation’s foremost public poet.
—Moynagh Sullivan in Poetry Ireland Review“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 hardback, €25
