Dharmakaya (the word is borrowed from "The Tibetan Book of the Dead") is Paula Meehan's fifth and most recent volume of poetry. Hers is an ability to use words to evoke timeless truths as she engages in verse that showcases an Irish feminist sensibility, as well as dialoguing between western poetics and Buddhism. Sudden Rain: I'm no Buddhist: too attached to the world/of my six senses. So in this unexpected shower,/I lift my face to its restorative tattoo,/the exultation of its anvil chime on leaf.//On my tongue I taste the bitter city furled/in each raindrop; and through the sheeted fall of grief/the glittery estate doth like a garment wear/the beauty of the morning; the sweet reek of miso//leached from composting leaves. Last night's dream/of a small man who floated in the branches of an oak/harvesting mistletoe with a golden sickle//I intuit as meaning you'll be tender and never fickle/this winter, though this may be synaesthetic/nonsense; I've little left to go on, it would seem.

This amazing collection of poetry is by Irish poetess Paula Meehan, and describes in stunning beauty the trials of her life, loss of a child, womanhood, Irishness, and gives an overall sense of what it is to be human... most of all, of being a passionate human, often destined for shadowy nature rather than a passionateless existence in "wherever" society places one. Her imagry is often a surreal design of an ordinary expierance. My favorite poems in this collection are Her Dream and Insomnia.

Paula Meehan's work tends to be very intimate and personal, and the work contained in Pillow Talk proves to be no exception. Stylistically, she is a lyrical, image-driven poet, often focusing on small details to create the overall picture, as in "My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis." Much of Meehan's writing is influenced by her early childhood spent in a neighborhood north of the Liffey. In an interview with John Hobbs which appeared in Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing (web site), she said, "The area I grew up in had all the attributes of a village. It was a fairly close-knit community, the last of the working class. All the traditional industries were in decline, so we were about to enter a world of no work and no hope. I don't want to romanticize it, because there were dark sides to the culture as well, but it was the end of this community as a stable, self-sustaining unit within the greater city....That village had an incredibly rich culture, at least in terms of the oral tradition....it's the context for many of these poems." This awareness of place and community can be seen clearly in many of Meehan's poems. For example, in "A Child's Map of Dublin," she writes,

I walk the northside streets / that whelped me; not a brick remains / of the tenement I reached the age of reason in. Whole / streets are remade, the cranes erect over Eurocrat schemes / down the docks. There is nothing / to show you there, not a trace of a girl / in ankle socks and hand-me-downs, sulking / on a granite step when she can't raise the price of a film, / or a bus to the beach.

This sort of writing appears often in Meehan's work. It roots her work very much in the present and conveys the impact of recent changes in Irish political, economic, and social life.