The Man Who Was Marked by Winter

From the Foreword of this 66 page book: "Just occasionally there is a poet who marshals the details and meanings of her time and place in such a way that she becomes an essential voice. Paula Meehan is a poet like that. These are the lyrics of the Dublin in which she was born and of the wider landscape she seeks out. They fit 'each surprising street to city square to diamond'. They invite the reader into a dimension of compelling details: of winkle fish and blackthorn and albino butterflies. They propose the unabashed enchantments of fragrant applewood or the bright bronze nib of a fountain pen. And then, in beautiful surprises of language and argument, the dimension unfolds and re-creates itself into the surprising and ambitious spaces of contemporary vision: of a poet who is also a woman, who is restating the Irish poem in terms of new initiatives and perspectives. This is a book of wonderful coherence and direction. Dependable in its clarity of image, but unpredictable in its reach into melancholy and elegy. And yet its purpose is always clear: to honor the hard, daily human adventure - to do it true justice - by memory and music and language."