Dharmakaya

by Meehan, Paula

• ISBN13: 9781930630055
• ISBN10: 1930630050
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press

Summary

In Dharmakaya, Paula Meehan’s fifth collection, the poems move between the timeless, unsituated spirit and its truths, and the living anguish and desire of a dying body that keenly feels its femaleness in an Ireland that is both haunted and hard-wired. “Dharmakaya,” a word she borrows from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, signals the span of the collection’s philosophical concerns: a dialogue between western poetics and Buddhism. Her formal concerns as a poet are enacted in gestures both received and open, drawing alike from her tradition and the disruption of that tradition.

Author Biography

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin in 1955 and currently resides there with her husband, the writer and critic Theo Dorgan. Meehan was raised in two famous working-class districts of Dublin, before graduating from Trinity College and Eastern Washington University. She is a member of Aosdána and is the current Ireland Chair of Poetry. Winner of the Lawrence O’ Shaughnessy Award for Poetry (2015), Paula Meehan has won several other prizes such as The Martin Toonder Award (1995), the Butler Literary Award (1998), and the Denis Devlin Award (2002). She has written six award-winning poetry collections, and she has also written plays for both children and adults. Wake Forest University Press has published two of Paula Meehan’s volumes, Dharmakaya (2002) and Painting Rain (2009). Meehan has also conducted writing workshops with inner city communities and in prisons, as well as universities.

Table of Contents

Dharmakaya	1	(1)
The View from Under the Table	2	(1)
Fist	3	(1)
That Night There Was a Full Moon, Little Cloud	4	(1)
Take a breath. Hold it. Let it go	5	(1)
My Sister Lets Down Her Hair	6	(1)
The Lost Twin	7	(3)
Thunder in the House	10	(2)
My Father's Hands That Winter	12	(2)
The Exact Moment I Became a Poet	14	(8)
The Lost Children of the Inner City
Molly Malone	15	(1)
Pray for Us	16	(1)
The Stone Faces of Dublin	17	(1)
History Lesson	18	(1)
Grandmother, Gesture	19	(1)
Window on the City	20	(1)
Buddleja	21	(1)
Ectopic	22	(1)
Train to Dublin	23	(5)
Three Love Songs
The Coast of Leitrim	24	(1)
The Bog of Moods	25	(2)
At Slyguff Lock	27	(1)
The Tantric Master	28	(2)
Elder	30	(1)
Aubade	31	(1)
Manulla Junction	32	(8)
Suburb
Desire Path	33	(1)
Stood Up	34	(1)
Pyrolatry	35	(1)
Stink Bomb	36	(1)
Mistle Thrush	37	(1)
Sudden Rain	38	(1)
Malice Aforethought	39	(1)
Literacy Class, South Inner City	40	(1)
The Trapped Woman of the Internet	41	(1)
Swallows and Willows	42	(1)
In Memory, John Borrowman	43	(5)
On Poetry
Virgin	44	(1)
Mother	45	(2)
Whore	47	(1)
Thaw in Milford, Michigan	48	(1)
Recovery	49	(1)
It Is All I Ever Wanted	50	(2)
A Woman's Right to Silence	52