Wake Forest University Press

1998   120 pages
paperback

Taking her title from the Wexford fishermen who became gunmen in the Irish rising of 1798, McGuckian carries the sea changes in language she has elsewhere wrought in bodily tropes of waves, tides, liquidity, and blueness into poems where “the long, long dead/ steer with their warmed breath/ my unislanded dreams” (“Feastday of Peace”).

1997   94 pages
clothbound

“This volume achieves exactly what a Selected Poems should: It is a splendid introduction to a lavishly gifted, complex writer, a point of entry into the manifold treasures of her oeuvre.” Irish Times

1997   94 pages
paperback

“[T]his selection has been beautifully chosen to introduce her to a new audience. Here are classically clear, startling lyrics with a buried wildness: poems to break your heart and save it. … Marvellous.”  The Poetry Book Society

1995   83 pages
clothbound

Captain Lavender represents a new stage in the growth of one of our most original and honest writers, one who can claim courageously, "meanwhile is my anchor."

1995   83 pages
paperback

McGuckian's "lines may be thought to take a stage further the possibilities for a contemporary women's writing opened up by Sylvia Plath in her Ariel poems." Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940

1992   112 pages
paperback

In the deft and mysterious poems of Marconi's Cottage, McGuckian evokes the uncanny presence of a muse whose "unseduceable two rows of small black doors" hinge life and death, the two sides of a single page, views from a room that faces in and out.

 

1988   60 pages
paperback

"Time and time again, her poems touch on the inextricability of the beautiful and the elusive….A classic in the making, On Ballycastle Beach will trouble many of us for some time to come." Stephen Yenser, Poetry

April  2009

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

"It is as if anger, grace and wit have been hammererd white-hot into the finest shining tool and ornament."  Maura Dooley

April 2009

clothbound    $19.95

2002   52 pages
paperback

Drawing its name from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Dharmakaya signals the span of the collection's philosophical concerns: a dialogue between western poetics and Buddhism. The poems evoke the fragile relationship between spirit and body, memory and the material.

Winner of the 2002 Denis Devlin Award from the Irish Arts Council for the best English language book of poetry in the preceding three years.

"Meehan's Dharmakaya shows an Irish poet extending her tradition with courage and wit. … [Her] voice is unmistakable now, and thrilling." Thomas D'Evelyn, Providence Journal