• "A Murmuration of Starlings in a Rowan Tree":Finding Gary Snyder in Paula Meehan's Eco-Political Poetics

Till lately some of the more credulous old men declared that many of the misfortunes of their people were caused by this modern disregard for the rights of the living cottonwood.

JAMES FRAZER on the Hidatsa Indians of North America in The Golden Bough (1922)

The Carcanet edition of Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya (2000) features a cover photograph by Ita Kelly of an enormous, gnarled sycamore maple, its several amputated branches healed over beneath a still thriving canopy, a gathering of picked flowers offered at its base. Entitled "Evidence of Tree Worship in the Botanic Gardens," the photograph's title manages to evoke both modernity's scientific gaze and a pre-modern belief in the animate spirits of trees. This doubled vision informs many of Meehan's poems where a willingness to weave precolonial and premodern ways of knowing with a modern secular rationalism and a socialist politics lends itself, as I have argued elsewhere, to eco-feminist readings.1 Developed in dialogue with the work of her literary mentors, among them the American poet Gary Snyder, Meehan's perspective powerfully addresses our historical moment of social and environmental crisis, when a change of consciousness and a shift in paradigm require intelligent retrievals and artful appropriations of alternative cosmologies. Just as Snyder's work both draws on and extends influences beyond national boundaries, Meehan's poems reflect a border-crossing sensibility informed by a working-class Dublin childhood and a keen understanding of the multiple dispossessions made possible by colonialism's current manifestation as corporate globalization.2 For these reasons, perhaps, Meehan's distance from dominant discourses of gender, nature, and class may be greater than that of many of her readers and her proximity to counter-narratives [End Page 195] generative of the cultural work her poems perform. Mindful of Gayatri Spivak's formulation, "strategic essentialism," I want to propose that Meehan's poetry engages in a "strategic animism" whereby a knowing subject enacts re-engagements with efficacious belief systems from the past. Indeed, by retrieving animals and plants from the margins, Meehan's narrators reopen a dialogue with an animate non-human realm still embraced by indigenous cultures. In her most recent collection, Painting Rain (2009), Meehan recuperates elements of ancient tree worship to explore human interdependencies with the plant world.

Central to the development of Meehan's eco-poetics and politics, Gary Snyder's oeuvre has long included, among its many celebrations of the living non-human realm, hymns to trees. His early collection, Myths and Texts (1978), opens with a dirge for logged forests around the world, written in the rhythms, as he describes them in his introduction to the volume, of

long days of quiet in lookout cabins; setting chokers for the Warm Springs Lumber Co. (looping cables on logs and hooking them to D8 Caterpillars—dragging and rumbling through the brush); and the songs and dances of Great Basin Indian tribes I used to hang around.

(vii)

This willingness to inhabit the borderlands of a dominant culture while bearing witness to its myriad abuses of what Winona LaDuke has called "all our relations," "animals, fish, trees, and rocks" (2) is common to both Snyder's and Meehan's writing. And both poets call on alternative cosmologies and spiritual traditions to suggest that the violation of our nonhuman relations is of a piece with violence toward human Others. Snyder closes his sequence "Logging" in Myths and Texts with a shocking stanza linking the destruction of sacred groves throughout human history with the cutting down of human lives: "Sawmill temples of Jehovah. / Squat black burners 100 feet high / Sending the smoke of our burnt / Live sap and leaf / To his eager nose" (15). A Judeo-Christian god party to the leveling of pagan groves is also complicit with death camps; the destruction of living trees and human beings are so intertwined that they go up in smoke together.

When Snyder entered the lives of Meehan's generation of Irish poets in the 1970s, his disaffection with the values of the U.S. settler culture described in Myths and Texts—"a still rootless population of non-natives who don't even know the plants or where our water comes from" (viii)—spoke to a postcolonial and class anger in Dublin's own youth culture. Countering the cultural toxins of colonial mentality, class prejudice, and gender [End Page 196] stereotypes, "the ideas coming in through poetry like Snyder's . . . were giving me an alternative to what I was getting through the church, the state, and the family," Meehan observes. "And certainly that opening out and that influence has lasted up to this day" (Allen Randolph). Snyder condemns the colonial history of his own country and renames the U.S. "Occupied Turtle Island." His work charts a quest "to actually 'belong to the land'" by resisting a narrative of conquest. A lifelong student of both American Indian cosmologies and Zen Buddhism, Snyder has used these oppositional discourses and practices to reforge his relation to a particular place over the last forty years, a home called Kitkitdizze—named for a local plant, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. By integrating indigenous belief systems, not only has Snyder become a model for doing "the work of becoming who you are, where you are,"3 he has also served as an important transmitter of alternative worldviews to Western readers and writers. For Meehan, his writing remains an important source: "One of the first contemporary poetry books I held in my hands was Gary Snyder's Regarding Wave, back in the seventies. I still read Snyder on a daily basis" (Sperry par. 10).

This engagement with Snyder's work, and through him with Buddhist and American Indian views of nature as animate, informs Meehan's complex view of "the interpenetration of all species and all creatures on the planet" (Allen Randolph). An early instance appears in the title poem of her second collection, Reading the Sky (1986), where the narrator turns the comfortably modernist notion of looking for weather patterns on its head by gathering omens from "the cyphers the wild geese drew// Across the violet sky" (13). Here, in dialogue with the narrator, the non-human participates in its own naming, becoming a source of new human knowledge: "We measured the angles of the stars / Revealed by the dwindling light / And gave to them new names // Learned from the geese in flight" (13). Moreover, the reciprocal encounter with birds and sky supplies the narrator and her companion with "a common language" of interconnection to name their own futures, "to describe our differing fates" (13). This animistic view of the natural world contains the human-made in the poem that follows, "Chapman Lake: Still Life with Bomber," where the narrator's holiday beside a lake includes a U.S. war plane as another aspect of the landscape: "The B52 bomber roars over. / It is as much a part of this lake / As those pines, those flies. / It too has designed its part / In my casual holiday. // Pines, bomber, flies, lake" (15). The gleaner of omens includes the human-made among her symbols, erasing the boundaries between nature and culture by leveling any hierarchy between them. The binaries continue to collapse as machine emerges animate, capable of its own unsettling designs. [End Page 197] Indeed, the ironic echoing of Yeats' line from "Easter 1916," "He, too, has resigned his part / In the casual comedy" in Meehan's "It too has designed its part / In my casual holiday" substitutes "bomber" for "Mac Bride," suggesting both are "drunken, vainglorious lout[s]." Set on U.S. soil and employing an emblem of imperialism, this poem, among many others, aligns Meehan's work with Snyder's own dissenting poetics. Central to that poetics is Synder's "basic perception of animism," "that on one level there is no hierarchy of qualities in life—that the life of a stone or a weed is as completely beautiful and authentic, wise and valuable as the life of, say, an Einstein" (The Real Work 17). This radical democratization among humans and nonhumans appears everywhere in Snyder's writing, the language of landscape sometimes intermingled with images of the human body as in "Straight Creek-Great Basin," where "Creek boulders show the flow-wear lines / in shapes the same / as running blood / carves in the heart's main / valve" (Turtle 52). Calling at the close of Turtle Island for the democratic representation of all life forms in any humane and sustainable society (1974), Snyder grants trees the status of "people of the land" because they "do the primary energy transformation that makes all the life-forms possible. . . . So perhaps plant-life is what the ancients meant by the great goddess" (108).

Such artful appropriations of premodern discourses for a postmodern culture connect both Snyder's and Meehan's work with a powerful ecopolitics. Indeed, for socialist eco-feminists like Vandana Shiva, indigenous peoples of the world provide us with the best models for conservation because their cultural practices are informed by the values of biodiversity; animistic belief systems grant all life-forms "an inherent right to life": "Sacred groves, sacred seeds, and sacred species have been the cultural means for treating biodiversity as inviolable, and present us with the best examples of conservation" (Biopiracy 77). For Shiva, rather than primitive, such beliefs should be considered futuristic because their sustainable models also provide powerful ground for resistance. For example, in Chipko, India, the belief in forests as mothers who provide the sustenance of water, food, fuel, fodder, and medicine has empowered Indian women to stop destructive logging and mining of their native forests: "Throughout the 1970s, in village after village, women would come out and by hugging trees—chipko means hug or embrace—prevent the logging companies from destroying their forests. . . . In the act of embracing trees as their kin, ordinary women mobilized an energy more powerful than the police and the brute strength of the logging interests" (Earth 67).

The Chipko women's belief in their kinship with trees is grounded in a direct relationship with the forests as sources of their own lives. Hence, animism [End Page 198] involves a deep awareness that human and non-human are inextricably interwoven: humans cannot survive and thrive without their nonhuman kin. In these terms, animism as a belief system in which "everything in nature, including what is now considered inanimate, is alive and has an inner spirit, soul, or organizing power" (Merchant, Columbia Guide 193), is clearly both informed and sustained by a way of life. Thus, when I call Meehan's animism "strategic," I am trying to account for an important self-awareness involved in its deployment: postmodern citizens of Western industrialized societies cannot abandon the experience of modernity for any absolute and uncritical embrace of alternative cosmologies. Yet by "animism" I am suggesting something more than a colorful metaphor, something less than an uncritical embrace. By "strategic" I mean that such a practice of "reading the sky" might serve as one tool among many for knowing one's world. Finally, my use of "strategic animism" attempts to mark the distance a citizen, largely informed by the experience of modernity, must travel to adopt a belief system like animism.

We can see the distance to be traveled in James Frazer's flawed classic, The Golden Bough (1922), which gives us a history of tree worship throughout the world from a modernist's lofty perspective: "To the savage the world in general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception to the rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own, and he treats them accordingly" (128). Because Frazer is so committed to the virtues of modernity, and because he sees the passage from animism to polytheism, for example, as such an unequivocal advance in human cultures, his work suggests what is at stake in both a belief system like animism as well as its abandonment:

When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree-spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animismis passing into polytheism. In other words, instead of regarding each tree as a living and conscious being, man now sees it merely a lifeless, inertmass, tenanted for a longer or shorter time by a supernatural being who, as he can pass freely from tree to tree, thereby enjoys a certain right of possession or lordship over the trees, and ceasing to be a tree-soul, becomes a forest-god.

(135–36)

From a tree with a soul to a god of trees: here a forest-god, increasingly in the likeness of a human, has dominion over the trees and forest rather than being bound by them, one survival depending upon the other. Moreover, because the tree has become "a lifeless, inert mass," it is merely of use, without rights or protection. It is a short step, of course, to Snyder's loggers. [End Page 199] What is lost emerges in Frazer's record of the Missouri Indians, for example, who felt such empathy for the suffering of trees that they believed when one was swept away by a flooded current, "the spirit of the tree cries, while the roots still cling to the land" (129). Thus, the Missouri considered it wrong to fell trees, and "when large logs were needed, they made use only of trees which had fallen themselves" (129).

Common in tree worship is the belief that the souls of the dead inhabit them. "Among the Igorrotes, every village has its sacred tree, in which the souls of the dead forefathers of the hamlet reside. Offerings are made to the tree, and any injury done to it is believed to entail some misfortune on the village. Were the tree cut down the village and all its inhabitants would inevitably perish" (Golden Bough 133). Frazer describes trees in China planted on the graves of the dead "in order to thereby strengthen the soul of the deceased and thus to save his body from corruption" (133); in this case, the dead are literally incorporated into the body of the tree. This shape-shifting between human and non-human tree suggests an important ethic among Buddhists familiar in both Snyder and Meehan's writing: believing "that to destroy anything whatever is forcibly to dispossess a soul, [Buddhists] will not break a branch of a tree as they will not break the arm of an innocent person" (129). Drawing on elements of animistic tree worship, Meehan's recent "A Change of Life," in Painting Rain (2009), gives us access to what it might mean for postmodern citizens to live as if kin to trees.

The sequence "A Change of Life" takes as its epigraph the last line of what Meehan has suggested is one of her founding texts, Snyder's "What You Should Know to be a Poet," from his early collection, Regarding Wave (1970). Snyder's is a poem of instruction written as an informal list for the prospective poet. Its injunctions largely by-pass human literary traditions in favor of a deep knowledge of the fauna and flora of place as tools for developing the intuitive and instinctual. Indeed, we might read "What You Should Know to Be a Poet" as a rendering in verse of Snyder's early description of poet as shaman, retrieving "the most archaic values on earth" from the "upper Palaeolithic." These values include "the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe" (Myths viii). Meehan recalls her early encounter with this poem: "luckily Snyder was a poet working in the wisdom tradition, so you could actually take it literally and not get into too much danger. . . . I wouldn't have taken that poem metaphorically, I would have taken it as real" (Allen Randolph). And it is precisely a reframing of the real the poem asks the neophyte poet to know: [End Page 200]

all you can about animals as persons.the names of trees and flowers and weeds.names of stars, and the movements of the planets and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

If, like Meehan, we take these "injunctions literally," we find ourselves in the presence of an organismic view of nature where animals are helpers and kin; plants and planets have proper names; knowledge of both the visible and unseen, the natural and supernatural, is accessed both empirically and intuitively; and a poet's texts include the material world, the dream world, and the illusory world of the psyche's projections. This late twentieth century reframing of the mechanistic model of nature connects Meehan through Snyder with the tradition of nineteenth-century Romanticism, which environmental historian Carolyn Merchant has described as a "turning back to the organismic idea of a vital animating principle binding together the whole created world" (Death of Nature 100). In this context, belief in a radical interpenetration not only of all creatures and species, but of the entire world, natural and supernatural, makes Snyder's injunction that the poet know "at least one kind of traditional magic" consistent with this organismic worldview—though the admission of a plurality of approaches in "at least one kind" provides a postmodern update. As in Meehan's early poem, "Reading the Sky," geese might indeed provide omens if they are interwoven with a larger whole, sharing a common language of interconnection. And the tools of magic and divination might grant, at the very least, intuitive access to "a vast organism, everywhere quick and vital, its body, soul, and spirit . . . held tightly together" (Merchant, Death of Nature 104).

Aptly, Meehan has described Snyder's poem as "an opening out into a perception of a world where there could be integration" (Allen Randolph), and in "A Change of Life," the narrator takes up Snyder's injunctions, the sequence opening with a ritual prayer before the commencement of a journey, and the narrator taking her cue from elements in the natural world—"that raindrop / on the tip of a tansy leaf," which serve as able guides. Though an earlier sequence about trees, "Six Sycamores," features a figure [End Page 201] in the section called "Liminal," who has found "a clear path through the chaos," where "nothing can harm" or "cure," the narrator in "A Change of Life" is more concerned with staying the course in a city which threatens to kill her with grief. The charge is made more difficult by the speaker's own vulnerable transitional status, "a change of life" echoing "the change of life" even as it suggests the I Ching counseled in Snyder's poem, a divination tool that might help to show the way. Rather than the delight in "thresholds, the stepping over, / the shape changing that can happen when / you jump off the edge into pure breath" sung by the speaker of "Liminal," the narrator of "A Change of Life" prays for something akin to the former speaker's poise and longs for a return, for a "green wave" that might "break over my ageing body" (63).

Here is a poem of major transformation at midlife when the role of communal witness requires all the poet's strength. The speaker knows much of the terrain, giving her own injunctions and well aware of the process she's to endure: "Elemental now, or mental / my two feet solid on this earth—/ the path ahead, the path behind" (62). The wry play of "mental" and "elemental" evokes the ritual stripping and debasement of initiation ceremonies, the old self ground down for the new. Yet even with "two feet solid on this earth," what haunts the narrator is precisely the puzzle of place. The "question of when to move" in "The Book of Changes" calls to the "repotting" in "Solomon's Seal" and to that section's restless: "will I still live in this suburban estate / when the mystery of the seal breaks open" (63). The challenge of belonging to a particularly conflicted place emerges again in "Sweeping the Garden" with a discounted gypsy child swept from Irish culture, given by her teacher the "blunt tool" of an out-of-date calendar which the child has humor and wit enough to interpret: "I'm living in the past!" (64). Ironically, the narrator, engaged herself in pre-modern ways of knowing, works to educate a child, "traveler still, forever gypsy" into modernity though her student already possesses a "beautiful cultured mind": "She swims in the oral: looking into a written sentence / is like looking into a bush. Numbers / are blackbirds that all flap up together from the page" (64). The child needs the tools of modernity to function in a postmodern capitalist culture though that culture resigns her to a lowly class status with "each and every long-drawn / incarcerated moment of her school year" (64).

Central to "A Change of Life" is a dying chestnut grove. The trees make their first appearance in the third section of the poem where they are coupled with a demented youth exposing himself outside a train station. Entitled "Scrying," this poem gestures back to "The Book of Changes," both [End Page 202] sections alluding to Snyder's "What You Should Know to Be a Poet" as well as predicting the future of a New Ireland for those left behind. Here the whole island is caught up and controlled by the shadows of money and power, desire unleashed in an excess that amounts to surrender to the more base instincts out of balance: "wandering around with our lower material selves / hanging out—like that boy the other day // near the dying chestnuts at the station / who, shaking his penis at me, screamed /What are you looking at, witch? (63). The proximity of the boy's distorted sexuality to the dying chestnuts suggests the counter-generative excesses of the New Ireland. This is not Snyder's wilderness on the San Juan Ridge in the Yuba River watershed but a Dublin housing estate with its entrenched class politics exacerbated by the worsening inequities of a tiger economy.4 What the poet sees and continues to see "breaks my heart" (64). As if to underline the toxicity of this environment for human and non-human alike, the boy lashes out in the poem's concluding line, aggressively complicit with the cultural forces inimical to him as well. Narrator and reader shoulder the intended slur of witch which accurately registers a dominant culture's assessment of the worldview the poem offers.

The poet's immersion in the demonic aspects of her own culture in "Scrying" finds its counterpart in the second half of Snyder's "What You Should Know to Be a Poet," where the poem moves to an archetypal realm in which the poet encounters both "devil" and "hag" and is enjoined to "fuck" them both. In Jungian terms, this call to struggle with both the unintegrated shadow side of the self and the darkest forces in nature, including human nature, hones the poet for genuine relations with human lovers and friends. What's left after these mythic transformations is an alert engagement with the mundane: immersion in the ephemeral oddities of one's own popular culture, including "children's games, comic books, bubblegum, / the weirdness of television and advertising" (Wave 40) as well as patient acceptance of work, the work of craft and basic human labor for sustenance.

But the apparent innocence of "children's games, comic books, and bubble-gum" in Snyder's poem is lost for the working-class children in the fifth section of Meehan's sequence. The demented boy of "Scrying" finds his double "where the boy racer has hit the wall—/ Coked up to the gills, says the cop" (65). The title, "Common Sense," emerges as the necessary counterpart to divination, the poem opening with a tree said to protect against witches, the rowan. But as if to suggest that common sense need not trump animistic belief but might instead exist strategically alongside it, the rowan does not repel this postmodern witch. Rather, the harvest of a [End Page 203] "mid-August berry feast" rains down on her head, aligning her, if unceremoniously, with pagan celebrations of seasons. Here is a tree fulfilling its role of kinship, supplying the narrator with abundance. It serves as counterpoint to the dying chestnut grove where children gathered up into poverty and ignorant of the trees that provide them with the pleasures of conkers, strip the bark from the source that nurtures them. These are misguided tree worshipers: "their rapt gazes as they stript / might have lent a Renaissance artist faces for an altarpiece" (65). Their fates inextricably bound with the trees they injure, the children cannot be saved by a narrator who refrains from dealing the cards that spell "bad luck / in store for them down their roads" (65). And neither can she save the trees, though the poem suggests what might have:

I wanted to wrap the trees in woolly jumpers—those saplings shivering through the winter.I watched them fail to bud and fail to leaf.

I watched them die through fair weatherthrough foul I have watched them die.My beloved young chestnut grove.And now an autumn without conkers!

(65)

The longing of Meehan's narrator to embrace the trees as kin emerges not only in the image of "woolly jumpers" but also in the eulogy the poem provides, its perfect iambic pentameter line—"I watched them fail to bud and fail to leaf"—in poignant lyric counterpoint to a lost spring. Interdependent with the community, the trees cannot survive without knowledgeable caretakers, and their loss deprives the neighborhood of one of its seasonal pleasures. With "My beloved young chestnut grove," Meehan's narrator evokes sacred groves and a way of life that sustained them. Recalling the "oak-worship of the Druids," Frazer found among the Celts the word for sanctuary "identical in origin and meaning with the Latin neums, a grove or woodland" (127). Without the sanctuary the trees provide, "Common sense dictates there'll be bad luck" (Meehan, Painting Rain 65): humans cannot thrive without their nonhuman kin.

A volume of eulogies interlinking human and nonhuman destinies, Painting Rain mourns the deaths of fields and trees alongside the deaths of friends and family. Indeed, we might find in the burying of these dead another form of tree worship, lives memorialized in poems and incorporated into the paper of a book, which was once the wood of trees. "A Change of [End Page 204] Life" concludes with one such memorial for a cousin raised as a sister, mourned in the presence of leaf, rain, and flower. In "Hectic" the body of Paula McCarthy becomes the body of the tree as the narrator lets go: "I'll let you drop leaf by leaf into the void" (66). Trees and departed sister merge again in the image of "the trees hectic in the woods," the feverish activity of the grove evoking McCarthy's death by fire. The poem returns us to Painting Rain's opening epigraphs, both Theo Dorgan's "The mysteries of the forest disappear with the forest," and the tail swallowing wisdom of The Diamond Sutra. This Buddhist text, said to compress all teachings into one, takes the image of the diamond to cut through every illusion. Indeed, Meehan's poem suggests that to bear the grief of this much loss requires the hardest transformation, the compassion on the other side of every discarded illusory attachment, the "cut diamond" that might "Spark my obdurate heart" (67).

Snyder's "What You Must Know to Be a Poet" concludes by wishing the poet both the eternalized delights of "extasy" in the "wild freedom of the dance" as well as the internal delights of "enstasy" in "silent solitary illumination" (Regarding Wave 40). And then there are the fragments with which Meehan's poem begins: "real danger. gambles. and the edge of death" (40). Perhaps in returning to the last line of Snyder's founding text at the opening of her own, Meehan means both to re-inscribe vocation while also expanding, revising, extending, updating, and transforming the first poem's injunctions. While Snyder's poem reads as a historical template, Meehan's "A Change of Life" responds with a particular case study. And while the earlier poem's injunctions seem to hold, Meehan suggests that the stamina required to fulfill them is enormous: "Foot before foot slog up the path" (67).

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick is a Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she teaches poetry, Irish studies, and environmental writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. Her critical work includes editions of Irish and Scots novels by Maria Edge worth, Susan Ferrier, and Sydney Owenson for Oxford's World's Classics Series, and the edited collection, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (University of Alabama Press, 2000). She is also the author of three volumes of poetry, The Body's Horizon (1996), Beyond Reason (2004), and Out of the Garden (2007). She is currently at work on the manuscript Enraptured Space: Gender, Class, and Ecology in the Work of Paula Meehan.

Notes

1. See "Between Country and City: Paula Meehan's Ecofeminist Poetics." Out of the Earth: Eco-critical Readings of Irish Texts. Ed. Christine Cusick. Cork: University of Cork Press (forthcoming).

2. For definitions of modern and pre-modern, see New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) in which editors Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris find the etymological origins of the term modern during the consolidation of industrial capitalism and possessive individualism: "Closely associated since the lC18 [late-eighteenth century] with the notions of 'progress' and 'development' attributed to the West, the attribute 'modern' [End Page 205] describes a wide range of historical phenomena characterized by continuous growth and change: in particular, science, technology, industry, secular government, bureaucracy, social mobility, city life, and an 'experimental' or modernist approach in culture and the arts. However, when viewed as a distinctive quality emanating out of 'the West,' or claimed as a property of particular social groups, the modern becomes a standard against which other customs or ways of life are judged pre-modern" (219). Thus, this distinction between the modern and the pre-modern sets up a binary that supports Western imperialism: "The prescriptive view that to modernize was to Westernize political institutions, social customs, and economic practices formed the basis of modernization theory in mC20 [mid-twentieth century] sociology, and in designated 'backward' zones within the West, as well as in communist countries and in postcolonial nations established in the 'developing world,' poor workers, women, native peoples, 'minority' cultures, rural societies, peasant communities, and underclasses were targeted for redemption by the missionary force of the modern" (222).

3. For more on this process, see Rosemary Ruether's "Corporate Globalization." Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory. Second ed. Ed. Carolyn Merchant. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2008. 95–102.

4. In her recent interview with Amanda Sperry, Meehan welcomes the stay in "Late century capitalism run riot. Now that the boom is over and we've gone into recession and the government is using taxpayer's money to bail out the banks, we may have a breathing space to estimate what's been lost through the unmediated and rampant greed that characterized both planning and building in nineties and noughties Ireland." Retrieved on 3/5/09 from www.wfu.edu/wfupress/A interviewwithPaulaMeehan.html.

Works Cited

Allen Randolph, Jody. "The Body Politic: A Conversation with Paula Meehan." Special Issue: Paula Meehan. An Sionnach 5:1&2 (Spring/Fall 2009).
Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. 1922. New York, NY: MacMillan, 1951.
LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999.
Meehan, Paula. Dharmakaya. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 2002.
———. Painting Rain. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 2009.
———. Reading the Sky. Dublin: Beaver Row Press, 1986.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1980.
———. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2002. [End Page 206]
Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1997.
———. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005.
Snyder, Gary. Regarding Wave. New York, NY: New Directions, 1970.
———. Turtle Island. New York, NY: New Directions, 1974.
———. Myths and Texts. New York, NY: New Directions, 1978.
———. The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979. New York, NY: New Directions, 1980.
Sperry, Amanda. "An Interview with Paula Meehan." November 2008. Wake Forest UP. Retrieved 3/5/09. Wake Forest U. <www.wfu.edu/wfupress /AninterviewwithPaulaMeehan>. [End Page 207]

Share