As if by Magic Paula Meehan BA (1977) is one of Ireland’s foremost poets and most distinctive voices ©Stephanie Joy Your latest collection of poems, As If By Magic: Selected Poems , presents a generous offering of your poetry spanning thirty years. A great deal has changed in the world in the arc of time covered by this work, how does this collection bear witness to such changes? If, as I believe they do, poets channel the zeitgeist, then this book charts what it was like to grow to womanhood in an Ireland that was morphing from a virtual theocracy to a diverse, multilingual, multi-ethnic, democracy. An unfinished project - but exciting to have been part of that change and to express it in poetry. You arrived in Trinity in 1972 at the age of 17 to study English, History and Classics. How important was this experience to your early development as a poet? I was a pioneer, being the first of my family to have third level education. I was from the inner city originally, and spent my teenage years in Finglas, in a new estate. To sound that experience within the college walls gave a strange acoustic to my early poems. I had brilliant teachers, I made lifelong friends. Trinity was a crucial dreamtime. Why did you select ‘Alma Mater’ for this feature? Alma Mater is usually translated as ‘nourishing mother’. Robert Graves connects the word ‘alma’ to ‘ulmus’, the elm, which was used for supporting the young vine, the alma mater of the Wine- god. Sixty Trinity elms were lost to Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970’s. It is dedicated to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, a great poet of Trinity and a great teacher. Click here to read ‘Alma Mater’
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