MY CULTURAL LIFE
Paula Meehan has published seven award-winning collections of poetry, most recently Geomantic. A former Ireland Professor of Poetry, her public lectures from the professorship, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees
in Them (UCD Press), considers poetry in the contexts of community, family and selfhood. A hefty volume of her work selected from over 30 years publishing, As If
By Magic, is due out later this year from Dedalus Press (dedaluspress.com). The Dubliner has taken to gardening during lockdown. “Now it is my agricultural life, as I’m never out of my gardening clothes… Theo [Dorgan], my beloved, has built me a waist-high coldframe, a knacky design, where I nurse the germinating seeds…
“It may be a deep and ancestral need to comfort myself that has me chitting potatoes (Arran Victories) in the back bedroom and planting, if not nine bean rows, than one row of nine beans in my small suburban garden. And some garlic, peas, lovage, with herbs various.”
Lyrics: Bob Dylan “Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’, Lincoln
County Road or Armageddon?” So rhymes the great Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan in a song that is always bubbling under the surface of my consciousness as I walk the beautiful 2km radius around my home here in Baldoyle. In the park someone has tied a magnificent crocheted blanket around a tree. There’s a hand-painted sign ‘The Wishing Tree’ and folk have painted stones with flowers and positive admonitions to mind ourselves. Music: Steve Cooney If my days are filled with the music of the suburbs — strimmers, drills, Liveline, dogs, crows and seagulls, the music of what happens — then there is also the music I put on when I come in from the sunny spring weather. This month that is Steve Cooney’s Ceol Ársa Cláirsí: Tunes of the Irish Harpers for Solo Guitar, which puts a rich ancestral vibe around the house. The tunes go back to the beginning of the 17th Century and remind me that as a species we are hardwired for survival. Book: A Ghost in the Throat I’ve just put down a book I couldn’t put down. A Ghost
in the Throat, by the poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, a book as steeped in the nature of haunting as Wuthering Heights.
Described by its publishers at Tramp Press as “autofiction”, a term that probably covers all memoir, it is the story of a young mother negotiating a crisis pregnancy and emergency delivery, part scholar, part literary detective, part witch, wholly poet, who is obsessed, and possibly possessed, by the spirit of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, maker of the 18th-Century poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Organisation: Poetry Ireland Poetry, my trade, is ideally suited to isolation. Some of the greatest poetry in the world has been written in extreme states of imprisonment and isolation, from the Russian poets who wrote in the shadow of Stalin’s Terror, to Yannis Ritsos’s poems from the internment camps of the Greek civil war and the regime of the colonels. Remember and celebrate our poets and our poetry on Poetry Day Ireland coming up on April 30. This year it’s happening online. www. poetryireland.ie