Paula Meehan's Reading List

"As we said on announcing the shortlist , Susannah Dickey’s Isdal is an astonishingly inventive look at a cold case, that of an unidentified woman found in 1970 near Bergen in Norway. Armed with a wide variety of formal approaches and a formidable vocabulary, Dickey explores and satirises the true crime genre, and specifically our culture’s obsession with female victims."

"In The Coming Thing, Martina Evans offers a powerfully realised world—Cork city in the 1980s—and an unforgettable narrator, Imelda, on a journey to England for an abortion. From the strictures of a Republic which denied Irish women bodily autonomy until constitutional change in 2018, Evans creates an Everywoman on the brink of the digital age."

"Fran Lock’s Hyena! comes at the reader with all the feral energy of its totem animal; it’s a devouring and hallucinatory work that channels the embodied grief of the queerminded into a mirror for our age. At its deep heart’s core is a righteous and riotous engagement with working class culture’s magnificent anarchic spirit."

"Patrick McGuinness’s Blood Feather is a profound work of elegy, principally for the author’s mother, but also for the objects and places overtaken by time, for dynamited cooling towers and villages replaced by shopping centres, for the way one language replaces another. McGuinness is a brilliant ‘connoisseur of the noises things make when they leave.’ Being facetious I might respond as once Bob Dylan did when asked what a particular song was about: About three minutes. It is the energetic charge in a poem, the ritualising of language to powerful effect, that holds us in thrall. In Patrick McGuinness’s grief-laden poems it is the lyric pulse itself that compels our attention and we open in compassion to his loss."

"? It is an extraordinary long poem spoken by four twelve-year-old girls in working class Belfast. Watson has a remarkable ability to recover both the sensations of childhood and the febrile atmosphere of the Troubles, where terror was normalized and violence endemic. Through their eyes we get a map of their community, of their nigh-adolescent longings, their hopes and oppressions. We loved its filmic vividness and its creation of four compelling, believable, characters."

"Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, impeccably transported from the Chinese by his long time translator Brian Holten, offers us a clear lens on the lived reality of a haunted world of exile and displacement. Yang Lian is a political exile since 1989; these are recent poems. Displacement is a central concern of contemporary poetry everywhere, so many of our poets are exiled, or migrants, or far from their homeland. The PEN Heaney Prize recognises the important conversations that take place across languages, it celebrates the radical understandings that poets can bring from one mother tongue into another, it acknowledges that English is an imperial language with deep roots in other languages and we are curious about other ways and means of saying. Steeped in classical Chinese poetry, with a spirited understanding of historical forces, Yang offers us elegy as a sublime art in a fallen world. An experimentalist, his adventures in his mother tongue are reflected in Brian Holten’s exciting use of English syntax and pronunciation to create a similar impact. Well if the books of poetry of last year are anything to go by we have entered a time of hybridity in poetry. Genre mash ups, novels in poem-clothing, texts for performance, multi-voiced poems, entertainments in typography, talking in tongues, riddling and rhyming, chanting and ranting, glossolalia and logorrhoea, all the inarticulate speech of the heart—the strategies are complex and varied. And through the whirligig the lyric power of one human voice breaking silence. One book you’re weeping, the next you’re laughing your head off. As always poetry, even at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, is singing our strange, complex, lives into language, with great verve and style. Browse our full selection of the best books of 2024 here"