Randall Jarrell once wrote of Elizabeth Bishop that "all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it". Paula Meehan's poetry is similarly distinguished by its rootedness in the observation and memory of urban life, even as that reality is filtered through the angled, playful and often disturbing perceptions of the poet. As with her earlier volumes, The Man Who Was Marked By Winter and Pillow Talk, many of the poems in Dharmakaya are elegiac, representing, in effect, a work of mourning for an absent maternal figure. Meehan's poems about women are frequently tinged by grief at the loss of maternal solace, and newer poems like "Take a Breath. Hold it. Let it go" and "The Lost Twin" demonstrate the continuity of this process in her writing. At the same time there is a recognisable difference: these poems are more distilled, clearer in outline, and less rhetorical than some of her earlier work. The daughterly voice is evident in "My Sister Lets Down Her Hair":
we are lit in the cold morning by only
her rivery hair, the strong flow of her hair,
in the mirror her golden hair. The little
clouds of our breath eddy across the room
to the further shore of the window
giving on gardens and sheds. She keeps
an eye for the factory bus.
The hair represents a Rapunzel-like rope into the past in this witty rewriting of Yeats's many "hair-tent" poems, but keeping an eye for the factory bus is a trope of what Meehan's poems achieve in a wider sense: they are never wholly unconscious of social necessities. In this Meehan contrasts strongly with the poetic foremother explicitly invoked in her poem "It Is All I Ever Wanted": Eavan Boland. Meehan's poetic negotiations with Boland are significant. While her debt to Boland's feminism is clear, the sequence entitled "Suburbs" clearly represents a revision of Boland's poetry on the same theme. Boland's versions of suburban pastoral tend to ignore social realities beyond the more immediate gender question, reinscribing a myth of maternity among the whitebeam and clematis of south Dublin. Meehan's take on suburban life could not be more different. In "Pyrolatry" the speaker rushes to take in her washing to avoid the toxic fumes from a wheelie bin which has been stolen from her estate and burned; in "Stink Bomb" the rowing protagonists are interrupted by next door's dog, nicknamed "the Hound from Hell".
In Meehan's work there is little expectation of a sustained retreat to idyllic contemplation. Not that northside or inner-city experience is any more real than life in Dublin's more affluent suburbs. But Meehan's awareness of deprivation and violence counterbalances her poetry's lyricism and gives it greater ethical force. Few poets are as well placed to write sensitively on such matters, and poems such as "Literacy Class, South Inner City" and "Thunder in the House," purged as they are of a desire to mythologise the feminine, are among her best.
This new volume also displays less hankering after consolatory ritual than her earlier work, an impulse which brings with it all the perils of slack incantatory rhetoric. Many of the poems have a winter setting, as though Meehan were purging her work of its tendency to over-ripe earth-mother apostrophe of the kind found in "Not alone the rue in my herb garden" from Pillow Talk. Indeed the humorous side of mysticism is depicted in "The Tantric Master", a witty send-up of sexual solemnity from an impatient woman's point of view, and the intense verbal vitality of "The Bog of Moods" is another demonstration of Meehan's ability to poke fun at herself. Although poems like "Mother" and "Recovery" can skirt dangerously close to bathos, most of the work in Dharmakaya is sober, elegiac and limpid without being pofaced, confirming an advance and maturation of Meehan's voice.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic