Life
1955- ; born inner city Dublin [Gardiner St.]; ed. Central Model Girls’
School; family moved to Finglas, where she was expelled from Holy Faith
Convent; studied successfully on her own for Intermediate Certificate;
involved in street theatre in Dublin after her Leaving Certificate; BA,
TCD and then Masters of Fine Arts from Eastern Washington Univ., America;
winner of Martin Toonder Award for Poetry, 1974; Arts Council Bursaries,
1987 and 1990; writer in residence at TCD; her partner is the poet, editor
and broadcaster Theo Dorgan. ATT DIL2
Works
Poetry collections, Return and No Blame (Dublin: Beaver
Row 1984); Reading the Sky (Dublin: Beaver Row 1986); The Man
Who Was Marked by Winter (Oldcastle: Gallery 1991); Pillow Talk
(Oldcastle: Gallery 1994; rep. 2000), 74pp. 1995 [incls. ‘Berlin
1991’ and prose-poem sequence]; Mysteries of the Home (Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Bloodaxe 1996), 96pp.; Dharmakaya (Manchester: Carcanet 2000),
63pp. Three Irish Poets: Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Mary O’Malley
(Manchester: Carcanet Press 2003), 144pp.
Miscellaneous, contrib. to Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams, eds., Krino, ‘The State of Poetry’ [Special Issue] (Winter 1993), p.47 [‘… is the sum of the states of the poet.’]; ‘Dharmakaya’, in Fortnight Review (Dec. 1995), p.14 [commem. Tom McGinty, ‘The Dice-man: ‘become a still pond in the anarchic flow / The streets unceasing carnival altered and redeemed.’]; "Thunder in the House" (The Irish Times, 19 Dec. 1998) [infra].
Criticism
Theo Dorgan, ‘Interview with Paula Meehan’, in Colby Quarterly,
28 (Dec. 1992), pp.265-69.
Antoinette Quinn, review of The Man Who was Marked by Winter, in Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1992).
Tracy Brain, ‘Nobody’s Muse, Pillow Talk with Paula Meehan’, in Irish Studies 10 (Spring 1995), pp.11-15.
Inez Praga, ‘Interview with Paula Meehan’, in The European English Messanger, 6, 2 (Autumn 1997), pp.14-20.
Alexander G. Gonzalez, ed., Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Some Male Perspectives (Westport / London: Greenwood 1999), 184pp.
Mitsuko Ohno, ‘Hokusai, Basho, Zen and More: Japanese Influences on Irish Poets’, in Journal of Irish Studies (IASIL-Japan), XVII (2002), pp.15-31; p.24 [questionnaire-response]
W. J. McCormack, reviewing Return and No Blame (Beaver Row),
in Books Ireland (Oct. 1985), p.153.)
Catriona O’Reilly, review of Paula Meehan, Dharmakaya (2000), 63pp.
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Notes
“Thunder in the House” (The
Irish Times, 19 Dec. 1998), a poem, deals with experience of living
beneath a tenement flat occupied by a violent father who beats his daughter,
conjugating the responses of self, mother, and father, and ending ‘while
from our plastered ceiling shook a fine fall of snow.’
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)