To mark a century of Ulysses, three of Ireland’s leading arts organisations – ANU, Landmark Productions and MoLI – have joined together to present Ulysses 2.2, a year-long, nationwide odyssey of creative responses to the 18 episodes that chronicle an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom.
In response to Episode 6 of the book, Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s most prominent living poets, has produced a brand-new collection of poetry, For the Hungry Ghosts, written through the powerful and deeply personal lens of the grief and trauma she has experienced, inherited and lived.
Bloom’s journey on the 16th of June 1904 across Dublin to a funeral in Glasnevin Cemetery is also a journey into Bloom’s interior obsessions, into the underworld of his emotional life: the suicide of his father; the death of his child; his fraught relationship with his wife Molly and her wandering eye; the anxiety attendant on his daughter’s blossoming into womanhood.
In collaboration with master musician David Power, Paula Meehan will premiere an intimate performance of her elegies, poems of mourning and signposts to recovery and survival, drawing on the live resonance of the uilleann pipes to channel volcanic emotion and to ritualise and assuage grief.
Commissioned by ANU, Landmark Productions and MoLI as part of Ulysses 2.2, in partnership with Kilkenny Arts Festival.
