Mysteries of the Home

Book excerpt: Mysteries of the Home gathers into a single volume a selection of poems from Paula Meehan's two seminal mid-career collections, The Man who was Marked by Winter (1991) and Pillow Talk (1994), both of which won considerable praise from critics and readers alike. Included here are some of her best-known and best-loved poems - 'The Pattern', 'The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks', 'My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis' and 'The Wounded Child' among them. They show an artist at the height of her powers producing work of "remarkable candour and ... stunning lyricism" (The Colby Quarterly). Paula Meehan was born in 1955 in Dublin where she still lives. Besides six collections of poems, the most recent of which are Dharmakaya (2000) and Painting Rain (2009), she has also written plays for both adults and children and conducted residencies in universities, in prisons and in the wider community. Paula Meehan is a member of Aosdana and the recipient of a number of awards, including the Marten Toonder Award for Literature in 1995 and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award in 2001."