The Solace of Artemis

Patterns and patterning — cellular, celestial, social, political and personal — spin and weave through Paula Meehan’s new collection of poems. From the mythic to the mundane, her attention is given over to the examination of interconnected lives — her own, the lives of her family, the human ecology of her native Dublin. As well as a decade’s worth of new poems, The Solace of Artemis and integrates her sequence Museum (2019), commissioned for the Dublin Tenement Museum, and For the Hungry Ghosts (2022), her poem cycle responding to the Hades episode of Joyce''s Ulysses.

Patterns and patterning - cellular, celestial, social, political and personal - spin and weave through Paula Meehan''s new collection of poems. From the mythic to the mundane, her attention is given over to the examination of interconnected lives - her own, the lives of her family, the human ecology of her native Dublin - and the unfolding of pattern-cycles in the non- human world.

Meehan''s familiar impulse towards blessing and empathy is shadowed in these poems with a clear-sighted understanding that the human perspective is neither privileged nor superior, an awareness that much if not most of existence is indifferent to our all-too-human dramas. Nevertheless, explorations of family, of her own mortality, of the lives of long-dead tenement dwellers, shift and shine in a web of stories that speak to a stubborn human endurance that is sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic - and occasionally transcendent.

As well as new poems, this collection integrates Museum (2019), a sequence commissioned for the Dublin Tenement Museum, and For the Hungry Ghosts (2022), a poem cycle responding to the Hades episode of Joyce''s Ulysses.