Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them

Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them is the third volume in UCD Press's The Poet's Chair series, publishing the public lectures of the Ireland Professors of Poetry. The Ireland Chair of Poetry was established in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is supported by Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaion. Michael Longley's and Harry Clifton's lectures were published in 2015. Paula Meehan's volume of The Poet's Chair meditates on poetry and mythology, geology and the environment, teachers and the lyric, bees and bears, genetics, memory, personal history, and much else. In three wide-ranging lectures she charts a contemporary poet's relationship with community (emblematised by bees), family (emblematised by bears), and selfhood (emblematised by water). Upon her appointment as the Ireland Professor of Poetry, Meehan was praised as a poet of solidarity, whose work upheld the dignity of the human spirit and skilfully blended a shared and personal history.Now at the end of her tenure, this illuminating volume of her writings as Chair gives a remarkable insight into the creative processes of a poet who has contributed so much to the craft of Irish poetry.

Table of Contents:
Foreword; Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them; The Solace of Artemis; Planet Water; A Note on Texts; Biographical Note.

About the Author :
Paula Meehan was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College Dublin and at Eastern Washington University. She has published six original award winning collections of poetry: Return and No Blame (1984), Reading the Sky (1986), The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991), Pillow Talk (1994), Dharmakaya (2000) and Painting Rain (2009). She has also written plays for adults and children and has held residencies in universities, in prisons and in the wider community. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry, presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award (for Dharmakaya), and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. In 2015 she received the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Hall of Fame. Meehan is a member of Aosdana and was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2013 to 2016. Geomaniic, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming autumn 2016.

Review :
'Paula Meehan - who has held the Ireland Chair of Poetry for the last three years - attempts in these highly engaging and energetic lectures to come to some definition of what role poetry can play in our lives, and how it might help expand human consciousness. In the task she has set herself here, Meehan succeeds. Remarkably so, in fact.' Irish Independent, 25 July 2016 '...in the lectures collected here [Meehan] has created both a sourcebook and a catechism for new kinds of poetries. These lectures offer a new open architecture for a different kind of person-centred Irish poetry. This is not the usual alternative, the post-doctoral Beckett-Coffey route, but the modernity of a personal presence in the poem, a poetry beyond rhetoric. Utterly outmoded nationalisms and loyalisms are set aside and in their stead a person-centred aesthetic is established; an aesthetic that derives from the direct treatment of all things, including honey bees.' Dublin Review of Books, October 2016'The themes of Paula Meehan's lectures might be summarised pithily as 'bees, bonnets, bears and water', or as 'magic, mythology and poetry'... There is much that is autobiographical in these lectures, revealing the nature of the development both of the poet herself and of her art.' Hugh McFadden, Books Ireland, Nov./Dec. 2016 'Meehan's prose is close in tone to her manner as a poet. She is modest; she allows her voice to remain ordinary and then soar only if the occasion has been hard-won and the new tone is needed. In these lectures, she makes her reading an essential part of her life, as indeed she makes reading her life an essential part of her poetry. There are no false notes, or moments where her confidence has outrun its source. She is always rooted, and then ready to muse and remember, ready to use everything she knows to see through, see into, see beyond.' Colm Toibin, Poetry Ireland Review, 2017