Weaving the fibres of broken things A Contrary review by Grace Wells  Paula Meehan has always worked to heal the fragmented; the lines of her poems restore the irredeemable and gild the ordinary, and remain tender, as though she were picking up the fibres of broken things, working them together to weave not so much a solid fabric, but more, some form of healing net. Air, water and the furies of earth pass freely through her lines, and the essences of all matter are caught up in her harvesting threads. As if to reinforce this idea of Meehan patiently bent over an unending mythical task of repair, the image of a lattice appears several times in Painting Rain. She writes of “a net of branches”, “a web of stars”, of sycamores that “loose and net the sky by turns”, and if there isn’t a handy character from Greek myth to whom to liken Meehan, it’s probably because Meehen’s tradition is far older; her song line springs from the net patterns carved and painted on the Neolithic goddess figurines that Marija Gimbutas has written so engagingly about. Meehan’s net has always been of the deep female, When we’ve licked the wounds of history, wounds of war, we’ll salute the stretcher-bearer, the nurse in white, the ones who pick up the pieces, who endure, who live at the edge, and die there and are known by this archival footnote read by fading light; fragile as a breathmark on the windowpane Meehan’s previous work has always made reference to runes and spells and sorcery, and in Painting Rain, she continues to draw effectively on the language of witchcraft, with its ability both to unsettle and beguile. She freely tells us about walking “out once/barefoot under the moon to know” a doomed field “through the soles of my feet”, so that “I might possess it or it possess me”. The description she offers of her grandmother, in ‘St John and My Grandmother—An Ode’ could be a self-portrait, “Avatar of hearth mysteries,” for whom the “world was always signal portent”. And if the grandmother’s recalling of her dreams, could “rivet, terrorise, warn or shrive you”, Meehan’s poems have the same power. We’re not surprised when Meehan tells us her grandmother’s dream tongue was her “first access to poetry:/by her unwritten book I’ve lived, I’ll die.” Still, it’s the subtle suggestion of a world without Meehan that contains the familiar, oracular note, which makes her work so indispensable. Death is evidently weighing on Meehan’s mind, Painting Rain has a thick vein of poetry about the passing of loved beings, from a “first death”, that of a favourite uncle, through lost trees and fields, to the blunt, “Staring Death down/with a bottle of morphine in one hand,/a bottle of Jameson in the other/laughing at Death”, and the mournful “we’ll never know now what prompted you to use fire”. We grieve as Meehan “buries summer” with the passing of these characters, but rather than overwhelm us with sorrow, the poems serve to confirm, and allow us share, Meehan’s “simple love” for “all that’s left behind”. Alongside her inviting enchantress quality, Meehan has a satisfying ability to see engaging things in the ordinary; she tells of surviving a flight, “till we are landed and taxiing along/the runway, plane and shadow joined at last.” Elsewhere she turns “away quickly from that door into the room/that once was air above a green field/summer stitched through it by swallows’ deft needlework”. Yet her true gift to Irish poetry has always been her unstinting generosity with truth. Whereas a lot of poets of her generation still won’t admit to indecent laughter, sex, mistake making or excesses of emotion, Meehan’s elegant candour, her honesty to tell us she has been “demented with grief” or “overcome with desire”, or that in ‘A Stray Dream’, her partner has been “humping some dancer in a run-down gaff”, have paved the way for generations of younger Irish writers to really say what happened. However, the works that define Painting Rain, and cement it as Meehan’s finest collection to date, are the unparalleled poems about her family, which appear at the back of the book. These pieces lay bare the distilled dysfunctional. The plots and themes of these poems are intertwined with material from recent visits to Greece. The poet shimmers between the Dodecanese and a traumatic childhood in tenement Dublin. Lines here add to and intensify work from previous collections, and it makes sense that Greece, with its counterbalancing weight of equally epic tragedies, allows Meehan to have her full say. Still, for all the horror, there is incredible poise. By referring to Greek myths, by stepping out of Dublin to leave us with the medicinal quality of the Aegean, Meehan is able to tell us the truth, but adhere to Dickinson and tell it at a slant. The result is uncomfortable, unforgettable poetry that deserves only the highest praise. Grace Wells is an English poet living in Ireland and a regular contributor to Contrary. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

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Painting Rain

Paula Meehan

2009, Carcanet Press

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SUMMER 2009 COVER YELLOW FINCHES JIM KROSSCHELL THE FACTORY: AN ELEGY IN 6 PARTS REBECCA LEHMANN CROW YEAR PAUL SILVERMAN DAY OF THE DEAD ARLENE ANG THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS EDWARD MC WHINNEY BABY IN A JAR TANIA HERSHMAN REVIEWS JOHN PIPKIN J. ROBERT LENNON MARY STRACHAN STEPHEN HAVEN C.E. CHAFFIN PAULA MEEHAN DAG SOLSTAD D.A. POWELL Summer-2009.htmlFinches.htmlFinches.htmlFactory.htmlFactory.htmlCrow_Year.htmlCrow_Year.htmlDead.htmlDead.htmlSisyphus.htmlSisyphus.htmlBaby.htmlBaby.htmlReviews.htmlPipkin.htmlCastle.htmlStrachan.htmlHaven.htmlChaffin.htmlSolstad.htmlPowell.htmlshapeimage_5_link_0shapeimage_5_link_1shapeimage_5_link_2shapeimage_5_link_3shapeimage_5_link_4shapeimage_5_link_5shapeimage_5_link_6shapeimage_5_link_7shapeimage_5_link_8shapeimage_5_link_9shapeimage_5_link_10shapeimage_5_link_11shapeimage_5_link_12shapeimage_5_link_13shapeimage_5_link_14shapeimage_5_link_15shapeimage_5_link_16shapeimage_5_link_17shapeimage_5_link_18shapeimage_5_link_19shapeimage_5_link_20shapeimage_5_link_21