Dharmakaya

In Dharmakaya, Paula Meehan's fifth collection, the poems move between the timeless, unsituated spirit and its truths, and the living anguish and desire of a dying body that keenly feels its femaleness in an Ireland that is both haunted and hard-wired. "Dharmakaya," a word she borrows from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, signals the span of the collection's philosophical concerns: a dialogue between western poetics and Buddhism. Her formal concerns as a poet are enacted in gestures both received and open, drawing alike from her tradition and the disruption of that tradition.