As If By Magic: Selected Poems (Paperback)

As If By Magic: Selected Poems By Paula Meehan Cover Image

As If By Magic: Selected Poems (Paperback)

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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.
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. She has published seven collections of poetry which have received both popular and critical acclaim. She has moderated workshops in the community, in the prisons, and in recovery programs, and has worked extensively with emerging poets inside and outside the universities.
Product Details ISBN: 9781930630987
ISBN-10: 1930630980
Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
Publication Date: April 1st, 2021
Pages: 296
Language: English
“It is as if anger, grace, and wit have been hammered white-hot into the finest shining tool and ornament.” —Maura Dooley

“Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing—a vocational poet of courage and integrity.” —Carol Ann Duffy

 “To say that Paula Meehan’s work is informed by the fact she is of working-class origin, a woman and has integrated into her imagination the folklore and dream consciousness of her forebears would be unfairly reductive and yet it would be misleading not to refer to them at all. Her work has won plaudits from critics and prize-givers at the same time as it has attracted a wide following from non-poetry specialist readers. There is an erotic charge to much of Meehan’s work which, to borrow a phrase from Eavan Boland, lays beneath the surface of conventional sexuality like a reef below water. Her poems are sensual both in her handling of ideas and in her handling of the words which convey those ideas.” —Patrick Cotter