Paula Meehan touring United States

Wake Forest University Press poet and  current Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paula Meehan, has been charming audiences in the United States on her current reading tour.

Earlier in March, Meehan appeared at HoCoPoLitSo’s Thirty-Sixth Annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry. And on Thursday, April 3, Meehan will be reading at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. The reading will take place at 7 pm in the Montante Cultural Center on Main Street at Eastwood Place in Buffalo.

On April 7, 2014, she, along with Eamon Grennan, Frank Bidart, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Jane Hirshfield, will be reading poetry in celebration of the life and works of Seamus Heaney at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Tickets for the event are $25 and can be purchased from the library here.

Here’s an example of Paula’s talent: a poem written for Seamus Heaney, published in her most recent collection Painting Rain.

A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write

for Seamus Heaney 

Heading towards the Natural History Museum                                                                    across the snowy paths of Merrion Square                                                                                the city hushed, the park deserted, in a daydream                                                                      I look up: a heaving net of branches, leaf-bare                                                                   against the pearly sky. There, like a trireme                                                                             on an opalescent ocean, or some creature of the upper air                                                 come down to nest, a cargo with a forest meme,                                                                    only begotten of gall, of pulp, of page, of leaflight, of feather.                                              What snagged that book in the high reaches of the oak?                                                            A child let out of school, casting heavenward the dreary yoke?
An eco-installation from an artist of the avant-garde?
Or the book’s own deep need to be with kindred—
a rooting cradled again in grandfather’s arms,
freed of her history, her spells, her runes, her fading charms?