Painting Rain

Reviews / Votes

'Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing - a vocational poet ofcourage and integrity. Already much-loved and admired far beyond theshores of her native Ireland, Meehan advances her claim on our heartsand minds with Painting Rain. From present-day Dublin to AncientGreece, the myths and flawed heroes of her poems give back to us our ownlives, counted out in illuminated moments of joy, pain, love andmemory.'
Carol Ann Duffy 'In Painting RainPaula Meehan makes music that is a powerful confluence of themes: afield lost to a housing development, a north wind that whines throughthe dunes, an Irish mother whose daughters 'taught their mother barringorders and legal separation'. Each poem is powerful on its own,demanding and holding the white space of each page, but the cumulativeeffect is one of great wisdom and authority. Meehan had that specialgrace from the start, but now immensities have crystallized around eachlyric she writes. Don't miss this work: Painting Rain is her finest book yet.'
Thomas McCarthy 'Theseare poems fuelled by a fierce perception and generosity of spirit,joyfully and sorrowfully open to human frailty, passion, the naturalworld - what it means to be human. Even in the darkness of grief andloss Paula Meehan celebrates life with a visceral, flaying attention. Itis as if anger, grace and wit have been hammered white-hot into thefinest shining tool and ornament. '
Maura Dooley PAULA MEEHAN'S poetry has always been shadowed with an awareness that life is no picnic. The privations of an upbringing in the streets and tenements of Dublin have featured in many of her best-known poems, such as 'A Child's Map of Dublin'. But the imagination always wins out; and a father we know from her other poems as someone who does not always succeed in the daily struggle to make ends meet can appear transformed in 'My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis', where he becomes 'suddenly radiant, / a perfect vision of St Francis, / made whole, made young again, / in a Finglas garden'.

Meehan's new book, Painting Rain, reveals a temperamental disinclination to be anything but direct. In her elegy, 'Hannah, Grandmother', her granny's decades-old advice about what to say in the Confessional booth seems remarkably prescient about recent revelations of clerical abuse: 'Tell them priests nothing . . . / Keep your sins to yourself. / Don't be giving them a thrill. / Dirty oul feckers'.

'Meehan has what many poets lack, a sense of humour'



Characters from the poet's own past are alive in many of the poems, and she does not shy away from describing troublesome family history. Memories tug at her even as she writes 'I pull the door behind me firmly closed'. And an elegiac sense extends to the changes Ireland herself is undergoing, as more and more land gets paved over and built upon, even as it now becomes clear that many of these newly built houses will remain tenantless for the foreseeable future.

The first poem in the book, 'Death of a Field', is among its most memorable. Paula Meehan has a gift for simply-put formulations, such as this poem's first line: 'The field is lost the morning it becomes a site'. She has a keen awareness of how the human and natural worlds interact. 'In wildness lies the salvation of the earth,' Thoreau famously wrote; Meehan makes clear how little encouragement nature needs to flourish and to enhance our own sense of being alive. In some settings the commonest weeds or wildflowers can be as life-enhancing as a forest of rhododendrons encountered on a trek through the Himalayas: 'The end of the field is the end of the hidey holes / Where first smokes, first tokes, first gropes / Were had to the scentless mayweed'.

Meehan has what many poets lack, a sense of humour - and there is nothing po-faced about her approach to environmental issues. In 'Six Sycamores', commissioned by the OPW as part of the Per Cent for Art Scheme, she riffs on the Park Superintendent's report on the damage caused on Stephen's Green during the Easter Rising: '6 of our waterfowl were killed or shot, 7 of the garden seats broken and about 300 shrubs destroyed'. Her poem carries a title that still has me chuckling: 'Them Ducks Died for Ireland'. Paula Meehan first appeared, twenty-five or so years ago, with Return and No Blame (1984), as a brightly coloured Irish fledgling. Painting Rain shows that she has, since then, turned into a bird of paradise. (OK, I know it's the male that has the colours, but this is poetry, where metaphor rules.)

There are - or is it her age? - more elegies than in previous collections. Tricky ground, but hers, for antecedents and friends, are full of cool craft and feeling; no sloppiness or lack of originality. A fine, left-field, example, with a wonderful twist of serendipity, is 'Hagiography':

Just back from Eigse Michael Hartnett

You'd have to laugh. His corpse not even cold yet.

Bery aboriginal to be beneath a sign as the brand new estate:

Address - Michael Hartnett Close, Newcastle West.

Its position is perfect - right opposite Coole Lane.

Stood there in the pouring rain with his son

Across from The Healing Streams Therapy Centre,

St Vincent de Paul, within earshot of the river

On a quiet day.

Get this: the story Joan MacKernan

Told us of the poetry workshop for children

Earlier, when she asked who'd heard of Michael Hartnett,

The lad who cried 'Miss, Miss, I live in Michael Hartnett'.

An Eigse is an annual arts festival (or, in this case, a wake?). The child, of course, lives in an eponymous place (or my reading is bonkers).

'Her Void: A Cemetery Poem', has one of those magic stanzas one always wants to see, the sort of beyond-prose always hoped for: 'The whirr of a bee's wing is music / and the roisined bow of the cricket, / and sad percussive raindrops.' Even detached from the preceding four stanzas, and the final, this is the purist poetry, a sort of unconscious amalgam of haiku and tanka (this is, on my part, a bit pretentious).

Meehan is also a master of the formal (back again to elegies) with the sonnet 'A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write'. In short, the poet sees a book, snagged in 'the high reaches of the oak?' The idea is that, whether chucked by a 'child let out of school', it's cast 'heavenwards' (unstated), and goes back, as it were, to the tree's roots.

Notably, she has a grand encomium from England's new poet laureate, who writes: 'Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing - a vocational poet of courage and integrity... From present-day Dublin to Ancient Greece, the myths and flawed heroes of her poems give back to us our own lives...' I can only concur. Painting Rain is Paula Meehan's first collection since Dharmakaya, also published by Carcanet in 2000. It is accompanied by a special double issue of the scholarly journal An Sionnach (AS), published in autumn last year, which celebrates and critiques in eighteen essays and one interview, as guest-editor Jody Allen Randolph points out, Paula Meehan's 'poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical commitments that underlie both.' (AS, p.5)

Originally from Dublin's north inner city, Meehan has always been aware, as she told Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias in an interview, that her native town 'was incredibly well-mapped in literary terms. But, yet, my city wasn't. (...) So, although there were all these maps I still felt rudderless in terms of my own life.' (AS, p.36) In his poem 'It takes trees in summer' Brendan Kennelly defines Meehan's stance in poetic terms: 'James Joyce would love to meet her / (...) because she could take him/to avenues parks squares lanes/he bypassed, didn't bother with' (AS, p.25). In the central sequence 'Six Sycamores' she takes her readers to such a site and thus achieves the aim, defined in her interview with Randolph, of 'integrat(ing) (her) work as a private memorialist with an impulse to express collective memory' (AS, p.260). It was commissioned by the Office of Public Works on the occasion of the opening of the Link Building between number 51 and number 52, on the east side of St Stephen's Green, Dublin, in 2001.

In order to mirror 'the architectural complexity and the ornamentation of the houses themselves' and 'what they stand for, the ascendancy class, the class privilege of the whole colonial adventure', Meehan decided to experiment with the sonnet, as both 'house and poem are received forms that can be re-inhabited and are re-inhabited' (AS, p.261)

In a technique that she somehow shares with Armantrout, she juxtaposes these sonnets with short monologues by ordinary people who are not stake holders, 'unornamented in plain speech with its own little dramatic vignette out of a life.' (AS, p.262) In the titles of these monologues, which are based on naval time, the poet is keeping a log. For example, in '12.53 Third Sycamore' the persona is self-effacing which makes the juxtaposition of a poor outsider's voice with the sonnet for 'Number Fifty-Two', built in 1771 by the banker David La Touche, all the more striking, urgent, and dramatic:

spare a few bob mister

a few bob for a cup of tea

any odds mister

spare change please

help the homeless missus

a few pence for a hostel

god bless you love

spare a few bob mister (p.30)

Thus Meehan enables her readers to eavesdrop on what she calls 'a conversation between the casual throw-away vernacular of the little pieces and the more tightly wrapped language and ritualized energy of the sonnets.' (AS, p.262)

For Meehan, 'the family can be a powerful prism, and gives you a freedom to explore your whole culture through those intimate relationships.' (AS, p259) It is an enlightening experience to read Heaney's 'Digging' alongside Meehan's 'Cora Auntie' in which the maternal line is retrieved and retained by replacing the spade with the sequin:

Sequin: she is standing on the kitchen table.

She is nearly twenty-one.

It is nineteen sixty-one.

They are sewing red sequins, the women,

to the hem of her white satin dress

as she moves slowly round and round.

Sequins red as berries,

red as the lips of maidens,

red as blood on the snow

in Child's old ballads,

as red as this pen

on this paper

I've snatched from chaos

to cast these lines

at my own kitchen table - (p.39)

In Painting Rain, Meehan once again manifests her 'strong sense of landscape, community, and selfhood as the triangulation' for her work. '(T)he concerns', she claims in an interview with Randolph, 'are global and always have been.' (AS, p.264) In the anti-pastoral poem 'Death of a Field' Meehan's persona becomes the 'professional memory of the tribe' (AS, p.268). Meehan relates to what she calls 'one of poetry's oldest functions' which for her 'is to not just memorialise place, but to translate a place into language so that it can be an archive in itself but also a measuring stick for future change.' (AS, p.267)

I'll walk out once

Barefoot under the moon to know the field

Through the soles of my feet to hear

The Myriad leaf lives green and singing

The million million cycles of being in wing

That - before the field became a memory map

In some archive on some architect's screen

I might possess it or it might possess me

Through its night dew, its moon-white caul

Its slick and shine and its profligacy

In every wingbeat in every beat of time

Her persona uses a romanticised style that might, in its diction, rhythm, and phonological quality, remind one of Dylan Thomas's 'Fern Hill'. However, in the final poem, 'Coda: Payne's Grey' (p.96), Meehan admits the impossibility of the poet's task to capture nature's movement in words. In her poem the painter's paradoxical effort to contain nature on canvas, to capture nature's movement and define it in stasis, is revealed:

I am trying to paint rain

day after day

I go out into it

drizzle, shower, downpour

but not yet the exact

spring rain

warm and heavy and slow

each drop

distinct & perfect

The final poem leads Meehan's readers back to the title of the collection and explains the epigraph from the Diamond Sutra: 'Words cannot express Truth. / That which words express is not Truth.' In her impressive sixth collection, the Irish poet Paula Meehan is something of a Janus writer. Two contrasting aspects of her poetry are formal lyricism and inspired story-telling on today's themes.

Born in 1955, she has connections with England where she lived as a young child; Ireland where she was educated and now lives (in Dublin but she also spent several years in Leitrim); the US where she studied and travelled in the early 1980s in contact with US poets including Gary Snyder.

She published her first full collection, Reading the Sky, in 1985. Her work evidences the melting pot which has been her experience: worldwide angst about war, climate change, economic book and bust, including for Ireland's 'tiger economy'.

There is bubbling ferment in much of Meehan's work. She is more natural rebel than shrinking violent and 'engages' energetically in her poems and in the plays she now writes for stage and radio.

Ferment extends to the shape of her writing, offering variety in form, language, approach. There is also a range of expression: some high flown, some incorporating informality and catch-phrases. Sequences may mix 'formal' and 'free' and, on occasion, 'found verse'. Much of this variation serves a purpose - for example, she writes about young offenders, using their speech.

Refreshingly whole-hearted 'timeless lyricism' remains a key element here. Irish poetry written in English has not suffered the distinct 'break' or 'show-down' with lyric tradition which is sometimes an issue for English poets. Her 'Void: A Cemetery Poem' shows Meehan confident with elegy:

The whirr of a bee's wing is music for her

and the rosined bow of the cricket,

and sad percussive raindrops

The poem was commissioned for a music/song cycle, partially accounting for the classical style, not actually echoing but somehow reminiscent of Shakespeare's songs. This is one of many poems using strong rhythm, rhyme, formal forms (or all three), including thirteen sonnets (among them, the Italian or Petrarchan version), couplets, tercets, a villanelle. Rhyme and half-rhyme are often a subtle, pervasive presence in poems which do not have formal schemes.

A prominent aspect of Meehan's work are the narrative poems and sequences with a strong storyline. The book opens with an impressive ecology poem, already much quoted by critics, 'The Death of a Field', but at the heart of this collection are loss, family crisis and the fascination Meehan obviously has with the more bizarre episodes in social life. Without sentimentality, she makes the stress of poverty come home to us in classic 'short stories' poems, pinpointing an era.

One is 'Hearth Lesson'. An over-wrought mother throws the weekly wage on the fire, ''It's not enough!' she stated simply. / And we all knew it wasn't'. Language here is simple but vivid: 'The flames sheered from cinder to chimney breast / like trapped exotic birds; / the shadows jumped from floor to ceiling, and she'd / had the last, the astonishing, word.'

A related poem is the bleak 'This is not a confessional poem', part three of a sequence about childhood, 'Troika'. There is much dramatic tension in the build-up to finding the mother apparently dead from gassing herself: 'We thought she was dead. / Her feet were like ice in my hands ... we might have missed her breath - / the thin reed of it rising, her sad tune to the air...'

Black humour is not far away in some narratives, including 'St John and My Grandmother - An Ode'. This seems to be based on fact - a grandmother who has vivid, scary dreams and believes they are prophetic. The poem makes reference to the Book of the Apocalypse as it works up to the sanguineous account of a dream, bringing in wide-ranging issues about the dark side of the human mind and the use of imagination to 'hold' our listeners.

An interesting longish poem, 'At Shelling Hill', is not based on one dramatic episode but is about the complex strands of holiday activity - play, talk, telling stories, doing things with the children. The rich casualness, the sunny mood, seems a long way from most poetry written by men, taking inspiration from women's 'multi-tasking'. As she ferries her children, the poet remembers legend: 'Come Sunday, before we left, we picked flowers, / armfuls of meadowsweet, cranesbill, vetch, an array / of lupin, of the wild dog rose, and walked to where Blathnat, / or so we've told them, she who was the lover of Cu Chulainn, is buried.'

Words like 'versatility', 'contrast', constantly crop up when considering Meehan's poetry. There is a downside to her wide range, however. At a hundred pages, I found the collection somewhat 'crammed' and imperfect in direction and control. A few poems were slight, incomplete. Meehan's work is often said to straddle lyric poetry and narrative. 'Straddling' can be an uncomfortable position. Two shorter poems, 'Shoes' and 'The Mushroom Field', both tell a potent story but also focus sharply on the bare bones of pain. These poems bring the two poles of her work closer together.

There are also new directions here, of which 'At Shelling Hill' perhaps represents one experiment and 'The Wolf Tree' another. In different ways, these are both meditative poems, not primarily 'telling a story'. The latter is an ambitious poem about pain and the human spirit and our relationship to nature.

It struck me as a tentative but an interesting sketch of where the work may be going.