As If By Magic: Selected Poems

$19.95

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.

Praise for Paula Meehan

“In As If by Magic, Meehan’s selected poems show a life dedicated to mastering that pattern, ‘tongues of flame’ ever-present in the passionate, exacting poems which fan out from her distinctive Dublin city childhood… But the pattern, the beat is central, ever developing throughout this, fine substantial volume.”
–Martina Evans, The Irish Times

“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

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