Text and Context: Paula Meehan

Abstract

This special issue celebrates and critiques the work of one of the most remarkable contemporary Irish poets. Over the past quarter century, through six volumes of poetry and eight plays, Paula Meehan has uncovered a terrain unique to her vision: lyric, dramatic, committed, and communal. The essays and interview featured in this issue clarify the extent of that vision by tracking Paul Meehan's poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical commitments that underlie both.And just as her poems are unique, so is her story. As the essays here show, Meehan found her world by displacing it. As a young Irish poet she left Ireland and traveled to the United States. She immersed herself in countercultural aesthetics, seeking out new narratives of Buddhism, neo-shamanism, bioregional ethics, and holistic healing. By so doing, she began her life as a poet by making profoundly original connections between Irish poetry and non-Irish influences, and positioning herself within them.Meehan's early work shows her continuing these multiple displacements: of city by suburb, of culture by counterculture, of Catholicism by Buddhism, of home by away. The deliberate estrangement of these encounters is eloquently described in this issue by another poet: "Meehan appears in her own early poems like some gypsy wanderer," writes Mary O'Malley, "with a gold ring, a sheaf of poems and the world her rightful oyster." Meehan's later work is acclaimed for its sense of place. But a closer look shows that a rich and inventive displacement within it has continued. fl