Paula Meehan on the poetry of Ireland

Paula Meehan, a celebrated Irish poet, will make the journey to St. Paul next week to receive the O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

Meehan is the author of five poetry collections and serves as the Ireland chair of poetry and the sixth Ireland professor of poetry.

She joined Tom Crann from Dublin to share her work and talk about what's happening in modern Irish poetry.

Her position in Ireland is endowed by a trust established to honor Seamus Heaney. Rather than have a statue carved in his image, Heaney preferred to leave a legacy that "would honor poetry itself," according to Meehan. The trust now selects an Irish poet ever three years to travel and introduce new generations to poetry.

"The language at the minute is suddenly confronted with Dublin becoming a multicultural center," Meehan said. "It's as if 'Finnegan's Wake' came home to us... In Dublin, you will hear Mandarin, Latvian, all the Eastern European languages. You'll hear Nigerian, French from North Africa as well as from France. It's incredibly a rich lingual field at the minute, we feel like it could go anywhere."

Paula Meehan reading 'My Father Perceived as a Vision of St. Francis'

Meehan will read in a public event at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul on Friday, April 24.