Patterns and patterning - cellular, celestial, social, political and personal - spin and weave through Paula Meehan''s new collection of poems. From the mythic to the mundane, her attention is given over to the examination of interconnected lives - her own, the lives of her family, the human ecology of her native Dublin - and the unfolding of pattern-cycles in the non- human world.
Meehan''s familiar impulse towards blessing and empathy is shadowed in these poems with a clear-sighted understanding that the human perspective is neither privileged nor superior, an awareness that much if not most of existence is indifferent to our all-too-human dramas.
Nevertheless, explorations of family, of her own mortality, of the lives of long-dead tenement dwellers, shift and shine in a web of stories that speak to a stubborn human endurance that is sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic - and occasionally transcendent.
As well as new poems, this collection integrates Museum (2019), a sequence commissioned for the Dublin Tenement Museum, and For the Hungry Ghosts (2022), a poem cycle responding to the Hades episode of Joyce''s Ulysses.
| Format |
Häftad |
| Omfång |
164 sidor |
| Språk |
Engelska |
| Förlag |
Dedalus Press |
| Utgivningsdatum |
2023-11-01 |
| ISBN |
9781915629159 |