Project MUSE®: An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 5 (2009) Latest Articles: An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the ArtsTWOProject MUSE®An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts1944-65351554-8953Latest articles in An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Doing the Same in English: A Sampler of Work 1987-2008 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362757
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Maurice Scully has been writing and publishing since the 1970s, though his name may not be quite so familiar to the average reader of contemporary Irish poetry. So, some context is desirable. In his signal critical volume Irish Poetry Since 1950 (2000), John Goodby labels Scully a "neo-modernist" and writes that "Scully's expressionism. . . is more obviously a continuation of the avant-garde's assault on art as institution. "This places Scully at a pole opposite the neo-bardic poetry of other, more well-known Irish poets. It has also made it more difficult for him to reach a wider audience. Up until now his work has been published by smaller presses such as Wild Honey Press (sometimes in the form of hand-sewn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallDoing the Same in English: A Sampler of Work 1987-2008 (review)2009-11-04text/htmlen-USDoing the Same in English: A Sampler of Work 1987-2008 (review)2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®106072026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Painting Silence in the World
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362758
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What do we think about when we look at paintings? Unless we have been instructed in the language of art history or schooled in a language of formal criticism, I suspect that most of us, faced with a painting, become quickly swamped in an attempt to command the experience by describing it to ourselves. We swim in a culture that, broadly speaking, is dominated by narrative, and this makes it very difficult for us to approach a sensory experience directly: we are always, in that revealing phrase, trying to collect our thoughts, constantly trying to order experience in language so that we may repeat it to ourselves and to others. We are rarely capable of switching off that incessant voice in the head, the self
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallPainting Silence in the World2009-11-04text/htmlen-USPainting Silence in the World2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®68312026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Paula Meehan: A Selected Bibliography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362752
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Note:Many of the RTÉ resources listed below can be viewed or listened to online through the RTÉ Libraries and Archives Web Site at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallPaula Meehan: A Selected Bibliography2009-11-04text/htmlen-USPaula Meehan: A Selected Bibliography2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®3512562026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Wexford and Arcady, and: Askeaton Sequence (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362753
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I first met the Irish poet James Liddy in 2001, shortly after I had moved to America. Studying literature at UCD in the 1980s, I had stumbled across his name a couple of times, but he was a remote figure to my Irish generation. Back then, the Ulster poets loomed large and even veteran modernists like Thomas Kinsella and Pearse Hutchinson seemed to be more like the writers we should know something about. Meeting James changed all that. He had great charisma, by turns, sharp, avuncular, learned, puckish, witty, enthusiastic—always with time for everyone. I saw firsthand how much he meant to generations of students in Milwaukee, where he taught, and what a legendary figure he cut in Irish-American literary circles.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallWexford and Arcady, and: Askeaton Sequence (review)2009-11-04text/htmlen-USWexford and Arcady, and: Askeaton Sequence (review)2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®131092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04A Tour of Your Country (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362754
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Eamonn Wall's first collection of poetry appeared in 1994 and, since then, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine the landscape of contemporary Irish-American poetry without him. Born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, he has lived in the United States since 1982, and his writing easily glides across the Atlantic; he paces the ocean and pulls the land of his childhood and the land of his adulthood into constant dialogue. His previous collections—Dyckman-200th Street (1994), Iron Mountain Road (1997), The Crosses (2000), Refuge at DeSoto Bend (2004)—all ask thorny questions of place, and Wall seems at home whether he is writing about Ireland or the prairies of North America. His non-fiction, too, explores such
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallA Tour of Your Country (review)2009-11-04text/htmlen-USA Tour of Your Country (review)2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®109032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Ancestor Worship (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362755
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I realize it may be more interesting for readers to have me write about the poet rather than the poetry. I say this only because the pitfalls of academic jargon are out there, and I'm just the clod to go traipsing through the field looking at the sky. Holy shit! That's poetry.Mike Begnal or Michael S. Begnal to fans and critics, has a new book from Salmon called Ancestor Worship (2007). He sent me a copy because, as a friend, he knew I'd like it. However, how does a poet living in North Carolina formerly of Pennsylvania and previously of Ireland know someone who has never lived anywhere but Milwaukee? Answer: James Liddy.Begnal came to Milwaukee to take on the prestigious position of the James Liddy Chair at the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallAncestor Worship (review)2009-11-04text/htmlen-USAncestor Worship (review)2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®101342026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Daphnis & Ratboy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362756
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Daphnis & Ratboy (2009) is the first and long-overdue book-length collection of poems by Jim Chapson. From start to finish, he presents a stunning body of work that deftly moves between razor sharp satire and passionate spiritual concern. While terms like "clarity" and "truth" may be out of vogue in today's poetry world, Chapson avoids obfuscation or trendy syntactical tomfoolery with a writing style that blends arresting Roman precision with Zen-like calm—one thinks of Reznikoff. Daphnis & Ratboy is not altogether detached (or "objective"), but the author successfully avoids any vain theatrics that might disrupt the flow of his language.Consider "Idyll 1," a poetic dialogue between two characters, Daphnis and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallDaphnis & Ratboy (review)2009-11-04text/htmlen-USDaphnis & Ratboy (review)2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®73022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Meehan's Stanzas and the Irish Lyric After Yeats
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362750
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Of the 374 numbered lyrics in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, there are 234 poems that are divided into more than one stanza. Of those 234, in only three are there instances of non-coincidence between the end of a stanza and a grammatical stop or pause. In the third part of "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" the second quatrain runs on to the third, even though there is a syntactical pause between the two stanzas:The second part of "The Tower" stages a dramatic break between two of its octaves:And the last, and most intriguing, instance of the Yeatsian enjambed stanza occurs in "Cuchulain Comforted," where the demands of the terza rima (the lone occurrence of the form in Yeats's Collected Poems) result in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallMeehan's Stanzas and the Irish Lyric After Yeats2009-11-04text/htmlen-USMeehan's Stanzas and the Irish Lyric After Yeats2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®456032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362751
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We've been talking recently about the early sound maps of childhood. You grew up in the city off Gardiner Street and moved as an older child to Finglas. Were there sonic elements of your childhood that particularly formed you as a poet?One of the most noticeable things about it, even to me as a child, was that there were no books, not many at least, in the houses around, in the flats. So an awful lot of the energy, the excitement was in the oral. I grew up in an oral tradition: the stories, the singers, the old people, the lore, the sometimes very empowering lore. I soon developed, I believe, a hunger for ritualized sound, in and of itself. The rhetoric around trade union politics, for instance, would feed it as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallThe Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-USThe Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®950262026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"A Murmuration of Starlings in a Rowan Tree": Finding Gary Snyder in Paula Meehan's Eco-Political Poetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362747
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Till lately some of the more credulous old men declared that many of the misfortunes of their people were caused by this modern disregard for the rights of the living cottonwood.The Carcanet edition of Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya (2000) features a cover photograph by Ita Kelly of an enormous, gnarled sycamore maple, its several amputated branches healed over beneath a still thriving canopy, a gathering of picked flowers offered at its base. Entitled "Evidence of Tree Worship in the Botanic Gardens," the photograph's title manages to evoke both modernity's scientific gaze and a pre-modern belief in the animate spirits of trees. This doubled vision informs many of Meehan's poems where a willingness to weave precolonial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"A Murmuration of Starlings in a Rowan Tree": Finding Gary Snyder in Paula Meehan's Eco-Political Poetics2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"A Murmuration of Starlings in a Rowan Tree": Finding Gary Snyder in Paula Meehan's Eco-Political Poetics2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®497362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Two Translations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362748
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“Elegy for a Child” and “Child Burial” were published in The Man Who was
Marked by Winter by Paula Meehan (Loughcrew: Gallery Books
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallTwo Translations2009-11-04text/htmlen-USTwo Translations2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®136892026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04The Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya and Painting Rain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362743
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In Ireland, there is a long politicized history of the interplay between culture and nature. In medieval Ireland, the borders between human and animal, culture and nature were fluid and sympathetic (Foster, "Encountering Traditions" 36). Such sympathy resurfaces many times in Irish literature, most notably in landscape writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in the reclamation of western Ireland that marked the Irish renaissance and Irish independence, and more recently in the poetry of John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Paula Meehan, which examines nature politically and socially as well as ecologically on its own terms. Between the medieval saints and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallThe Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya and Painting Rain2009-11-04text/htmlen-USThe Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya and Painting Rain2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®468152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04The Lyricism of Abjection in Paula Meehan's Drama of Imprisonment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362744
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When Calypso Theatre Company approached Paula Meehan in 1998 to write a play about prison life, the issues were not foreign to her. From the mid-eighties into the mid-nineties, Meehan had conducted writing workshops in prisons around Ireland: Arbour Hill and Mount joy prisons in Dublin; Portlaoise in Laois; and Shelton Abbey in Wicklow. It was the nineteenth-century Mountjoy prison that inspired the play Meehan wrote for Calypso, Cell: A Play in Two Parts for Four Actors and a Voice (hereafter, Cell). Published two years later by New Island Books, Meehan's portrait of the incarceration of four female prisoners in Cell invites reconsideration of the institution whose official purpose is to rehabilitate lives but
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallThe Lyricism of Abjection in Paula Meehan's Drama of Imprisonment2009-11-04text/htmlen-USThe Lyricism of Abjection in Paula Meehan's Drama of Imprisonment2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®388152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"Act Locally, Think Globally": Paula Meehan's Local Commitment and Global Consciousness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362745
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In "The Future of Irish Poetry?" Richard Tillinghast claims that the new generation of Irish poets—in contrast to the previous one dominated by figures such as Yeats, Mac Neice, Kavanagh, and Heaney—has a weaker sense of local rootedness, place, and locality. Whereas these previous writers shared a strong concern with ideas of nationhood and locality,[w]hen we come to the new poets . . . that old sense of Ireland seems to have gone up in smoke. It would seem that now, as a prosperous member of the European Union, host to waves of emigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, Ireland is just like everywhere else.In contrast to Tillinghast's view, Meehan's work, from earliest to her most recent, shows how the local
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"Act Locally, Think Globally": Paula Meehan's Local Commitment and Global Consciousness2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"Act Locally, Think Globally": Paula Meehan's Local Commitment and Global Consciousness2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®587862026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"Sharing Our Differences": Individuality and Community in the Early Work of Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362737
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The relation between an individual and society has been customarily perceived as inexorably antagonistic, constituting a source of potential, yet with conflict and struggle almost bound to happen. Consequently, an individual is portrayed as having to come to terms with frequently inconsistent expectations of the community and contradictory, or stereotypical, social roles that the world at large imposes. However, the writings of the philosopher Hannah Arendt remind us that it has not necessarily always been like that. Arendt indicates that during Roman times the phrases " 'to live' and 'to be among men' (inter homines esse)" and "'to die' or 'to cease to be among men' (inter homines esse sinere)" were employed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"Sharing Our Differences": Individuality and Community in the Early Work of Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"Sharing Our Differences": Individuality and Community in the Early Work of Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®573362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"Snatch a song from a stranger's mouth": The Stage Plays and Radio Dramas of Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362738
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The undertone of politicized backtalk, overheard in poems such as "Literacy Class, South Inner City," "The Exact Moment I Became a Poet," or most famously "The Statue of the Virgin of Granard Speaks," becomes dramatic and explicit in the voices of the women in the stage plays and radio monologues of Paula Meehan. In Mrs. Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), Janey Mack is Going to Die (2001), The Lover (2005), and Three hander (2005), Meehan interrogates the class and gender politics of one part of contemporary Ireland, a dispossessed urban world she has called "a community in crisis" (O'Halloran and Maloy 9), whose traumas, marginalization, and struggle she figures in images of imprisonment and isolation and through the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"Snatch a song from a stranger's mouth": The Stage Plays and Radio Dramas of Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"Snatch a song from a stranger's mouth": The Stage Plays and Radio Dramas of Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®941162026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"Transforming that Past": The Healing Power of Dreams in Paula Meehan's Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362739
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Having grown up in a sociocultural environment in which "people's dreams were as important as the news," Paula Meehan values and draws on the intuitive insight of dreams, often referring to the inextricable connection between dreaming and the poetic imagination (Dorgan 266). In Meehan's work, then, dreams are more than a mere literary device or motif; they impart what in one poem Meehan calls "a highly polished mirror for the present times" (Painting Rain, hereafter PR, 82) and simultaneously open doors into the past and into the future that are usually closed to waking consciousness. In Meehan's work, dreams are primary agents for change, transformation, and healing.Dream researchers have emphasized the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"Transforming that Past": The Healing Power of Dreams in Paula Meehan's Poetry2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"Transforming that Past": The Healing Power of Dreams in Paula Meehan's Poetry2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®530952026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04A Way of Going Back: Memory and Estrangement in the Poetry of Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362740
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The personal and the political are entwined in the poetry of Paula Meehan. It is a connection far exceeding any simple relationship between singular and collective perceptions, yielding instead to an enduring engagement with the processes of bearing witness. If poetry is for Meehan "an act of resistance, an act of survival," it aptly demonstrates that with human endurance must come an acknowledgment of the fragmentary and often inexpressible self (O'Halloran and Maloy 7). Many of her poems—from the earliest work through to the recent Painting Rain (2009)—return to traumatic childhood in order to explore the fraught attempts of the individual to find meaning in a hostile and confusing world. Memory is at the core of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallA Way of Going Back: Memory and Estrangement in the Poetry of Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-USA Way of Going Back: Memory and Estrangement in the Poetry of Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®499542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Painting Rain for Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362741
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It only seems like yesterday. Emerging from the Blue Mosque we glimpsed a sky of tattered blue above the Bosphorus that putme in mind of the blue baling twine you used to talk about, wisps and snags of it like blue sheep's wool flickering on the barbed wire fences of Leitrim. A sudden shower. Up in the Iron Mountains the old lads would be playing full-throttle bouncy fiddle and flute music, and I imagined you lilting the tunes to yourself in the barn—or maybe it was me, putting myself in your shoes—as you tried to undo the hames in the corner; the word being, as you pointed out to me, the entanglement a horse's harness becomes if discarded. Haywire, so to speak. A yesterday word which still serves a purpose. I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallPainting Rain for Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-USPainting Rain for Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®66602026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Text and Context: Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362731
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This special issue celebrates and critiques the work of one of the most remarkable contemporary Irish poets. Over the past quarter century, through six volumes of poetry and eight plays, Paula Meehan has uncovered a terrain unique to her vision: lyric, dramatic, committed, and communal. The essays and interview featured in this issue clarify the extent of that vision by tracking Paul Meehan's poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical commitments that underlie both.And just as her poems are unique, so is her story. As the essays here show, Meehan found her world by displacing it. As a young Irish poet she left Ireland and traveled to the United States. She immersed herself in counter-cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallText and Context: Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-USText and Context: Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®535522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"None of us well fixed": Empathy and its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan's Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362736
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"I'm no Buddhist: too attached to the world / of my six senses" wrote Paula Meehan in "Sudden Rain," a brief lyric poem in Dharmakaya (2000). The statement is both true and untrue, but its wavering distance from what is true and untrue is a dynamic aesthetic, a diary of oscillations, in the serious pilgrimage of this serious poet. It is now a quarter of a century since Beaver Row Press published Return and No Blame (1984), a book without packaging, a book without blurb or biography, that fell upon us like an LP from Motown Detroit. Meehan's was a voice both unexpected and unheralded, yet polished and certain. It was still the early eighties in Ireland, a land of lightly trodden and unpaved roads in women's writing.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"None of us well fixed": Empathy and its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan's Poetry2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"None of us well fixed": Empathy and its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan's Poetry2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®347552026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04The Apparitions of "Our Lady of the Facts of Life": Paula Meehan and the Visionary Quotidian
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362735
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"The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks," which first appeared in The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991), remains the Paula Meehan poem most familiar to the general reading public in Ireland. Its intervention into the cultural crisis of the prior decade triggered by the fierce legislative battles on contraception, divorce, and abortion; the tragic cases of Anne Lovett and Joanna Hayes; and the "moving statues" phenomenon has been frequently acknowledged.1 What is less widely recognized, and what this essay focuses upon, is this poem's place in Meehan's long-standing effort to fashion a visionary experience that redresses the spiritual destitution of modernity without being coopted by the patriarchal religious
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallThe Apparitions of "Our Lady of the Facts of Life": Paula Meehan and the Visionary Quotidian2009-11-04text/htmlen-USThe Apparitions of "Our Lady of the Facts of Life": Paula Meehan and the Visionary Quotidian2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®568032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04In Dublin's Fair City: Citified Embodiments in Paula Meehan's Urban Landscapes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362734
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Disciplines devoted to the study of space have traditionally omitted references to gender, sex, and sexuality from their theoretical frameworks, thus ignoring the relevance of these issues in the (re)production and distribution of spaces in both the public and private realms. Whereas this flaw was early detected by feminist scholarship, the relationship between the corporeal and the spatial still remains a vexed issue. As Liz Bondi points out in "Sexing the City," the interrogation of canonical space analysis has heavily relied on the sex/gender distinction. This binary was initially useful in highlighting the ideologically grounded nature of space—culture (gender), and not biology (sex), would be responsible for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallIn Dublin's Fair City: Citified Embodiments in Paula Meehan's Urban Landscapes2009-11-04text/htmlen-USIn Dublin's Fair City: Citified Embodiments in Paula Meehan's Urban Landscapes2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®571672026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Unfinished Business: The Communal Art of Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362730
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The first time I opened The Man Who Was Marked by Winter I marveled at the structure. I had, of course, known Paula Meehan's work for years. I had owned Return and No Blame since 1984 and Reading the Sky since 1985. I had even read with her in the mid-eighties in Dublin. Not that much of the occasion remains. My memory of it blurs into a crowded room in Buswells Hotel, a thin silvering of mist on the glass doors.What we said that evening is gone. But the conversation between poets continues in surprising ways. And so it was that I was holding the bright covers of her new book in the upstairs room where I worked in Dublin. It was early summer, 1991. The wild yellows of the laburnum outside made an improbable
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallUnfinished Business: The Communal Art of Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-USUnfinished Business: The Communal Art of Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®233692026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04"Hear Me and Have Pity": Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of Paula Meehan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362749
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The poems of Paula Meehan are at their core conjurations and this, in part, explains their haunting and evocative force. They abound in banished but revivified presences and in images of loss, failed communication or misapprehension, and death. Meehan's artistry routinely takes the form of elegy and carries out acts of mourning, both public and private. Although this has been a feature of her work from its inception, it has become a dominant aspect of her most recent collection, Painting Rain, which prominently assembles many different elegies and marks the passing, not just of family members and friends, but also of aspects of the Irish natural environment and of quotidian existence. It is the burden of this essay
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmall"Hear Me and Have Pity": Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of Paula Meehan2009-11-04text/htmlen-US"Hear Me and Have Pity": Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of Paula Meehan2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®470772026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04Memory, Poetry, and Recovery: Paula Meehan's Transformational Aesthetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362742
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Is the past ever really past? Time propels us ever forward, each present moment eluding our grasp as it falls away from us and we move into what was the future. And yet as we proceed, always negotiating that strange cleft between past and future, each moment leaves within us its trace. These traces connect us to myriad "prehistories" that may not be retrievable, may be only dimly perceivable, and yet persist within us as ghostly hauntings, apparitions, intuitions, pulsations. In both her poetry and in interviews, Paula Meehan's words can act on us as signposts to such intangible yet pervasive regions of existence. Her work is saturated with an awareness of those spaces delineated by the "pre": the prehistoric
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallMemory, Poetry, and Recovery: Paula Meehan's Transformational Aesthetics2009-11-04text/htmlen-USMemory, Poetry, and Recovery: Paula Meehan's Transformational Aesthetics2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®555292026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04City Centre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362733
<p></p>
The title of Paula Meehan's first collection, Return and No Blame, was lost on me until last week. Then I read again the title poem and it was clear as glass. In the poem, a girl walks into her house after a long time away, and sits at her father's table, glad to be back and gladly welcomed. The return caused me no problem, but the "no blame"was an unfamiliar concept. No guilt, was how I had unconsciously read it, and marveled at such a young woman's sureness. Last week I saw it differently. Blame is something you actively give, not something you take, and it is not the business of this essay to examine why one woman's blame is another's guilt, only to acknowledge that this poem reads as vitally now as it did when
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallCity Centre2009-11-04text/htmlen-USCity Centre2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®197992026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04It takes trees in summer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362732
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for Paula
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/435/image/coversmallIt takes trees in summer2009-11-04text/htmlen-USIt takes trees in summer2009-11-042009TWOProject MUSE®39052026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002009-11-04