Paula Meehan, whose engaged and enlivening stint as the Ireland Chair of Poetry recently ended, has chosen an unusual nine-letter title for her new book. Geomantic (Dedalus, €12.50), the back-cover blurb tells us, refers to "a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand."
If “divination” suggests a prophetic tone, that note is one Meehan’s readers will recognise from some of her best-known poems; the “tossed handfuls”, though, suggest a random patterning, which would not quite describe this book.
Meehan's most formally controlled work to date is the latest instalment in Irish poetry's recent engagement with long sequential forms. Geomantic takes its place alongside similarly formalist work by Ciaran Carson, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon and others, bending its material to fit the poet's chosen stanza shapes (and offering a counterpoint to the more loose-weave book-length sequences of predecessors such as Anthony Cronin and John Montague).
Gliding form
Meehan's book collects almost a decade's worth of poems, each of which is written in a form of her own devising: every line of the book is nine-syllables long, each poem is nine lines long, and there are 81 poems in total. The fractal symmetry of Meehan's form is then divided variously, with some sections in terza rima and others mirror-rhymed. At times she simply steps back and looks at the gliding form she is making, has made: "The frail glider suddenly mythic / is stopped a moment as if to prove / the craft is lighter than the learning." (The Last Lesson)
As if conscious of the technical challenge she has set herself, Meehan meditates on her craft, one poem comparing it to a grandmother's quilt, "nine squares / by nine squares, blue on green dots, stripes, bows / alternate with gold on red chevrons" – an image the poet then sets aside, because perhaps the whole point of the quilt (and this form) is that it enables the speaker to glance up and see, in the second half of the poem, "a roundy window / my own full moon" (The Quilt).
Another of the poems makes equally telling use of its mirror rhymes, first line rhyming with last, second with second-last, to describe:
“A woman I hardly recognise
flits from mirror to mirror; older
and wiser, she speaks in a sing-song
voice which lulls us both to clearer dreams,
spooled snugly on her cold craft of rhyme.”
(The Age of Embrocations and Naps)
Meehan's work has a particular and recognisable approach to central subjects and themes – family, society and the environment – and they recur in this new form. A charismatic and memorable performer, she proves once again her gift for the musical phrase and enviable ear for speech rhythms. The Rub typically uses those gifts to mix together ancient Greek tragedy and family life: "It was what she'd say when things got rough / back there in Thebes Central – the kitchen – / where it never came out in the wash, / the one original stain."
Family and history
The Luck is the first of a seven-poem sequence which sets family memory against a more local, national history. "I don't do the past, said my father, / into my old-fashioned microphone," it begins, but the poet does do the past, and in this outstanding set of poems, she handles the future too.
The Luck ends by bringing in horse-racing as a kind of futurology, as well as more ancient cyclical vision: "I knew that he'd be dead / by Samhain when the geese returned again. / We bet online and watched the horses, / all going round the bend together."
And Meehan has no illusions about what we can learn from the past. After all, as she says in The Child I Was, "I understood we were poor – we lived / on streets named for the patriot dead." The optimistic vision of 1916, say, can be no help to a speaker who knows only the disillusioning present:
“Historical grit – the first gunshot
or tricolour hoisted over
the GPO that Easter lunchtime,
or a secret memory handed down,
toxic in her lonely hearts of hearts.”
Meehan’s best poems hammer together different kinds of language, insinuating myth and abstract concepts into recognisably contemporary locations, as she does here.
Her other gifts, for narrative and transformations, are less evident in this book’s nine-line poems: there just isn’t room for her characteristic storytelling and, while she borrows some of the twists and turns she has used in her previous books’ sonnets, the poems can feel foreshortened, especially as there is rarely space to include the quickening impact of metaphor to extend and reimagine their scenes.
Short but still sweet
In The Memory Stick, she enumerates other forms, and offers a comic and all-too-familiar panic at the prospect that she might have mislaid "a whole summer's work in a square inch / cohesion of metal and plastic – / an ode, an elegy, a ballad, / a sonnet flawed by its rhetoric / but still retrievable at a pinch."
While the book does occasionally feel the pinch of its chosen form, Geomantic is clearly a strong, enjoyable addition to Meehan's impressive body of work: she writes poems that both speak to our contemporary world and imagine (or divine) another way of life. This is as clear in the way her poems think historically as in her sense of our current environment.
Her poems situate us in the mixed urban and natural world every Irish reader knows, and they implicate us in a sometimes rich, sometimes despairing sense of our 21st century moment. The January Bee notices: "I would have missed him only I stopped / mid-argument to watch the moonrise / over the wet roofs of the suburbs."
John McAuliffe's fourth book is The Way In (Gallery, 2015). He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.
