Summary

In the first book-length study of Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets emerges as an original voice whose perspectives on gender, class, and ecology are transforming the Irish literary landscape and beyond. Drawing on her own lived experience as a practicing poet, Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick explores how scholarship is grounded in an imaginative exchange between the words on the page and the material conditions of the scholar who works to inhabit them. With chapters of literary analysis swimming in a conversation between two poets, this book breaches the boundaries between criticism and memoir, suggesting ways that every scholar is transformed by the subjects they study. 
In Paula Meehan, Kirkpatrick has found a powerful poet to both study and love, and her reading of Meehan’s poetry and prose through the lenses of gender studies, the environmental humanities, and social class offers a passionate endorsement of Meehan’s radical interventions in the canon of Irish poetry. This work explores eight volumes of Meehan’s poetry, including Dharmakaya, Painting Rain, and Geomantic. 

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: In Medias Res
Chapter 1: Witnessing Class Trauma
Chapter 2: Resisting Environmental Injustice
Chapter 3:
Toward an Animistic Vision
Chapter 4: Restoring the Garden
Chapter 5: Beyond Human Exceptionalism
Chapter 6:The Shamanic Poet
Afterword
Works Cited
Index
 

Author

Kathryn Kirkpatrick is professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems, as well as the editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities and co-editor of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.

Reviews

"A polished, moving, deeply intelligent study of Paula Meehan’s poetry, which goes beyond a single poet’s life and work to illuminate an entire culture....I am unaware of another seriously academic study of a contemporary poet’s work written by another poet."

—Maureen O’Connor, University College Cork and author of Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction