Dharmakaya

Meehan Paula

Dharmakaya: "Truth-body", a beautiful and evocative word from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In her new book, Paula Meehan looks at how memory is lodged in the body, in physical consciousness, as much as in the old movies we run inside our heads. Two of her earlier collections, "The Man Who Was Marked by Winter" (1991) and "Pillow Talk" (1994), both published by the Gallery Press, were shortlisted for the Irish Times Irish Literature Award. This new collection marks a decisive development in her work both in formal and thematic terms. There is a paradoxical intimacy about Meehan's poetry: the voice can be quiet, even private, but the private world erupts or is broken open by the public world, its violence, its insistent issues. Nothing is given outright: hope and love have to be tested and tried; so does loss, which is never all loss.

Eavan Boland notes Meehan's "wonderful zest and warmth of tone. The themes are daring and open up new areas for her own work as well as for contemporary Irish poetry".

About the Author

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin where she still lives. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and at Eastern Washington University. She has published five previous collections of poetry and received many awards for her work including the Denis Devlin Award of the Irish Arts Council (An Chonthairle Ealafon) for "Dharmakaya", which Carcanet published in 2000. She has also written plays – for stage (for both children and adults) and for radio – and held a creative writing fellowship at University College, Dublin. Meehan has worked with inner city communities and conducted workshops in prisons.

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