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.