Dwelling, Máighréad Medbh

Dwelling is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. At its centre is Kate, Máighréad Médbh’s great grandmother, likely the subject of eviction during the clearances after the Irish Famine: a figure both spectral and grounding. From her displacement unfolds a meditation on ownership and loss, on land and energy, on how memory itself is harvested and converted into power. This hybrid text moves between poem, essay, and fieldwork, where turbines rise like white demigods over ancestral patches of ground, and wind is an agent of both inheritance and erasure. Through acts of walking, reading, and reimagining, the author explores how stories and the human trace are preserved — and who preserves them — in a landscape forever rewritten by industry, weather, and the vagaries of history. Dwelling asks: what does it mean to belong to land that no longer remembers you — or that you no longer recognize?

Ahead of the curve on spoken-word, Máighréad Medbh first moved within an Irish poetry scene that didn’t quite know what to make of her.
Open and international in her outlook, she embraced the body as a poetic instrument infused with the bardic vibration of the oral tradition.
This method continues to give her work a fluidity akin to dance, making her one of our most original poets of the last three decades. So it is
with Dwelling, her major new book.

Often shamanistic in its music and forensic in its explorations, Dwelling blends personal narratives, historical events and fictional constructions to show us where they intertwine within us. — Patrick Chapman

Máighréad Medbh belongs to an alternative spectrum of seeing and being, to an existence marked by unregistered colour as we know it, yet
occupied largely by female poets whose work retrieves the world’s unheard wind voices, earth voices, sexual voices. When I read this work, I
am reminded of the writings of the Galician poet Chus Pato, who similarly raids the existential past and present.

Máighréad Medbh’s imaginative journey seeks to recover what has gone adrift through accidents of translation, through accidents of
body which no longer articulate the links between place and disposition, and her exegesis moves forward from her great grandmother’s
childhood and womanhood, down the generations. This is no poetic memoir of easy recollection. This is a triumphant and deeply moving
work, achieved with a precision and admirable tonal reserve that liberates the reader to undertake the journey for themselves and without
judgement. —Mary O’Donnell

Published by Macha Press
Softcover, thread-sewn, french flaps
168 pages
210  x 210 mm
ISBN 9781068769931