Enraptured Space

Gender, Class, and Ecology in the Work of Paula Meehan

Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781959000457
• eBook ISBN: 9781959000464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the first book-length study of Paula Meehan, one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets emerges as an original voice whose perspectives on gender, class, and ecology are transforming the Irish literary landscape and beyond. Drawing on her own lived experience as a practicing poet, Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick explores how scholarship is grounded in an imaginative exchange between the words on the page and the material conditions of the scholar who works to inhabit them. With chapters of literary analysis swimming in a conversation between two poets, this book breaches the boundaries between criticism and memoir, suggesting ways that every scholar is transformed by the subjects they study.

In Paula Meehan, Kirkpatrick has found a powerful poet to both study and love, and her reading of Meehan's poetry and prose through the lenses of gender studies, the environmental humanities, and social class offers a passionate endorsement of Meehan's radical interventions in the canon of Irish poetry. This work explores eight volumes of Meehan's poetry, including Dharmakaya, Painting Rain, and Geomantic.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction In Medias Res
• Chapter 1. Witnessing Class Trauma
• Chapter 2. Resisting Environmental Injustice
• Chapter 3. Toward an Animistic Vision
• Chapter 4. Restoring the Garden
• Chapter 5. Beyond Human Exceptionalism
• Chapter 6. The Shamanic Poet
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover