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Dharmakaya

Paula Meehan

Cover Picture of Dharmakaya
Categories: 20th Century, Irish, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (264 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2000)
9781857544626
Out of Stock
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • The garden again. Finglas.
    My younger sister on the coalshed roof playing circus.
    Early June - elder blossom, sweet pea.
    The morning carries the smell of the sea.
    I'm above in the boxroom looking down at her
    through the window. Eldest daughter
    Packing what will fit in a rucksack...

                           from 'Take a breath. Hold it. Let it go.'

    Dharmakaya: 'Truth-body', a beautiful and evocative word from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In her new book, Paula Meehan looks at how memory is lodged in the body, in physical consciousness, as much as in the old movies we run inside our heads. Two of her earlier collections, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994), both published by the Gallery Press, were shortlisted for the Irish Times Irish Literature Award. This new collection marks a decisive development in her work both in formal and thematic terms. There is a paradoxical intimacy about Meehan's poetry: the voice can be quiet, even private, but the private world erupts or is broken open by the public world, its violence, its insistent issues. Nothing is given outright: hope and love have to be tested and tried; so does loss, which is never all loss.

    Eavan Boland notes Meehan's 'wonderful zest and warmth of tone. The themes are daring and open up new areas for her own work as well as for contemporary Irish poetry.'
    Paula Meehan was born in Dublin where she still lives. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and at Eastern Washington University. She has published five previous collections of poetry and received many awards for her work including the Denis Devlin Award of the Irish Arts Council (An Chonthairle Ealafon) for ... read more
    Awards won by Paula Meehan Winner, 2017 SOA Cholmondeley Award
    Praise for Paula Meehan 'These  are poems fuelled by a fierce perception and generosity of spirit, joyfully and sorrowfully open to human frailty, passion, the natural world - what it means to be human. Even in the darkness of grief and loss Paula Meehan celebrates life with a visceral, flaying attention. It  is as if anger, grace and wit have been hammered white-hot into the finest shining tool and ornament. '
    Maura Dooley
    'In Painting Rain  Paula Meehan makes music that is a powerful confluence of themes: a field lost to a housing development, a north wind that whines through the dunes, an Irish mother whose daughters 'taught their mother barring orders and legal separation'. Each poem is powerful on its own, demanding and holding the white space of each page, but the cumulative effect is one of great wisdom and authority. Meehan had that special grace from the start, but now immensities have crystallized around each lyric she writes. Don't miss this work: Painting Rain is her finest book yet.'
    Thomas McCarthy
    'Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing - a vocational poet of courage and integrity. Already much-loved and admired far beyond the shores of her native Ireland, Meehan advances her claim on our hearts and minds with Painting Rain. From present-day Dublin to Ancient Greece, the myths and flawed heroes of her poems give back to us our own  lives, counted out in illuminated moments of joy, pain, love and memory.'
    Carol Ann Duffy
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