Paula Meehan & Leanne O’Sullivan
“Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing – a vocational poet of courage and integrity.”
Carol Ann Duffy
“O'Sullivan's voice sounds with striking confidence and originality… these are poems not just of what it is to be young… but of what it is to be alive…”
Irish Times
Poetry and place are intrinsically linked. At its most resonant, a poem reveals the landscape anew – physical, mental, mythological – and Paula Meehan and Leanne O'Sullivan each evoke a unique and highly distinctive sense of place.
Paula Meehan's new collection Painting Rain explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Reflecting on the small virtues and large defeats that shape a world, hers is an ambitious meditation, from the point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet. Born and raised in Dublin, Meehan has published five previous collections of award-winning poetry.
When Leanne O'Sullivan made her literary debut with the acclaimed Waiting for My Clothes (04), she was barely out of her teens. Now the young poet from the Beara peninsula, West Cork, presents her second collection Cailleach – The Hag of Beara. The Cailleach – or wise woman figure – is embedded in the culture and landscape of western Ireland. In O'Sullivan's hands, the Cailleach of legend is humanised, her relationship to the rugged terrain and her own petrified mythology reviewed and reimagined.