Paula Meehan Ordre des livres

This new selection of poems by Paula Meehan resonates with integrity and sympathy. The poet moves from the feminist to the ecological, from the grittier urban spaces of the north side of center-city Dublin to the suburban spaces outside, never leaving the former behind while weaving the gathering themes in a compassionate web. Meehan writes evocatively about gender and class, never losing sight of the lyric purpose of her poems. She blends the comic and tragic as many Irish writers before her have done. In Meehan's poetry, particularly her most recent volumes, nature has historical and personal significance, but it also functions on its own terms. Meehan endeavors to examine the places, public and private, where nature and culture meet. At this intersection she begins to make sense of the suffering of innocents and the powerless, to chart avenues toward liberation, and to salve their psychological and physical wounds by finding poetry in the disappearance and reappearance of the natural world.

This Selected Poems gathers together work published between 1991 and 2016 from collections that have been lauded, awarded and widely translated, collections that have gained a large audience and a considerable reputation, nationally and internationally, for one of Ireland's foremost poets and most distinctive voices. A great deal has changed in the world in the arc of time covered by these poems, and those changes are noted and considered by poems that are remarkable for their clear-eyed witness. Meehan's devotion to, and mastery of, her craft, has always been one of the key signatures of her work, as has been her immersion in her beloved native Dublin. In her Selected Poems we see this and more -- her uncompromising engagement with the politics of gender and class, her love of the natural world and her grief at what threatens it, her holistic and visionary impulse to bless the creation, to be grateful for her place in it.