Geomantic

Comprising eighty-one poems 9-syllable 9-line poems, Paula Meehan’s extraordinary new collection explores the subjects of loss, return, memory and the power of art, in which 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.

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin where she still lives. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Eastern Washington University in the U.S. This is her seventh collection of poems. She has written plays for both adults and children, including Cell and The Wolf of Winter. Music for Dogs: work for radio, also published by Dedalus Press, collects three plays concerned with suicide during the economic boom years in Ireland. Her poetry has been translated into French, German, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Estonian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Irish. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award for Dharmakaya, published in 2000, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2015, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. In 2013 Dedalus Press republished Mysteries of the Home, a selection of seminal poems from the 1980s and the 1990s. She was honoured with election to AosdaÌna, the Irish Academy for the Arts, in 1996. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013 – 2016, and her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016.