"None of us well fixed": Empathy and its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan's Poetry

"I'm no Buddhist: too attached to the world / of my six senses" wrote Paula Meehan in "Sudden Rain," a brief lyric poem in Dharmakaya (2000). The statement is both true and untrue, but its wavering distance from what is true and untrue is a dynamic aesthetic, a diary of oscillations, in the serious pilgrimage of this serious poet. It is now a quarter of a century since Beaver Row Press published Return and No Blame (1984), a book without packaging, a book without blurb or biography, that fell upon us like an LP from Motown Detroit. Meehan's was a voice both unexpected and unheralded, yet polished and certain. It was still the early eighties in Ireland, a land of lightly trodden and unpaved roads in women's writing. Yes, Eavan Boland had recorded both her own image and her night feeds in brave, minimalist forms, but Caitlín Maude was suddenly dead, and the achievements of Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forché, and Jane Cooper were but distant rumors.

Such rumors would never reach certain ossified male quarters of Irish poetry, but Meehan was already conversing with the gathered-in and the living. In "The Apprentice" she wrote:

The poor become clownsIn your private review.But when all is done and said

Your swanlike women are dead,Stone dead. My women must beHollow of cheek with povertyAnd the whippings of history!

(Return and No Blame 27)

That "stone" before "dead" is crucial, edgy, local, unheroic. In "Journeys to my Sister's Kitchen" she catalogues the failed connections between her own vulnerabilities and the silences of her sister, domestic life as "any small dead thing / In the arms of its mother" that acts as a mirror with its own narrative, a mirror that might trap her into a familiar slavery:

In your sculleryYou wash and you rinseCrockery, cutlery.You stack them, you dry them.The doors and the floorsAre scrubbed, waxed, and polished –Hearth business.

(18)

The sister of the poem might have been that of another Dublin poet, Máire Mhac an tSaoí, who had written, eleven years earlier in Codladh an Ghaiscígh (1973):

Nigh agus sciúr agus glan,Cóirigh proinn agus lacht,Iompaigh tochta, leag brat,Ach, ar nós Sheicheiriseáide,Ni mór duit an fhilíocht chomh maith!

"Cré Na Mná Tí" (26)

Meehan's first book is weighed down with instances of alienation and remembered failures to cohere. It is a scarred witness of Irish life, yet determinedly still standing and wanting to speak out. From"T.B.Ward"with its "gobshite from Tuam" and "Slimy little fucker" and "Cronos: / Time eating his children" to the child's return in "Return and No Blame"with its "room of my childhood" where the narrator can "watch awhile the flames flicker /The story of our distance on the wall" the book's deepest impression is one of disturbance and dispersal, and of love as the fleeting comfort of women on the run from threatening domestic scenarios (39–40).

Her first collection was a powerful debut and what followed was more work of even greater power; work that would, over two decades, chronicle with honest indignation the war against the six senses of every Irish woman. Meehan's impulse is at all times sensual and political, a world where sisters not only walk into doors, but where art, too, is called to witness. In "Woman Found Dead behind Salvation Army Hostel" Meehan submits narrative to a double discipline. It is not just death, but an artist recording the image after "the beast who maimed her":

You can make a quick sketchand later, in your studio, mix the colours,the purple, the eerie green of her bruises,the garish crimson of her broken mouth.

(The Man Who Was Marked by Winter 56)

In "Night Walk" a living woman walks the streets late at night, walking out and away from love gone sour, but walking the gauntlet of eerie granite cobbles, Fumbally Lane, Blackpitts, Mount Street, past a night train of chemicals:

Let her too get home safe, your prayer,not like that poor woman last nightdragged down Glovers Alley, raped there,battered to a pulp. Still unnamed.

(Pillow Talk 20)

The anxieties are real, not mythical, based on stories told firsthand by victims. The politic here is one of deepest female empathy, a circling of those not too well fixed in the city of dread.

An Irish urban landscape emerges from these poems, a landscape that is as well-defined and distinctive as a Bill Brandt streetscape. Like the wet industrial cobbles of Carol Reed's films, it is trodden earth, hardened ground, an anti-pastoral, anti-romantic Ireland.

But Paula Meehan's world is not a land without "nature," not an inorganic world. It is the very opposite, in fact, garlanded with herbs and flowers, with knowledge of husbandry and a sensitized awareness of the changing seasons. Of "Elder" she writes:

I love its fecundity, its left aloneself designing wildness, especially in June,the tomcat pungency of elderblossomreeking our rooms.

(Dharmakaya 41)

But the garlanded nature of husbandry, that refuge of scented order, had been with Meehan from the beginning. In Return and No Blame she had written:

In the geranium roomAmong your choiceOf books and plantsCarefully tended –Because none knows better than youHow precious life is in that city. . . .

(Return and No Blame 58)

It is in the garden she receives the epiphany of her father as St. Francis, her father in the pandemonium of a frenzied Finglas dawn, feeding-chorus in Pillow Talk (1994); and it is in the garden that herbs, flowers, memories pass judgment upon broken relationships and "abandoned gardens, abandoned husband" as she names the husbanded spectres that accuse her:

Not alone the rue in my herb gardenpasses judgement, but the eight foothigh white foxgloves among the greysof wormwood, santolina, lavender,the crimson rose at our cottage door,the peas holding for dear life . . . .

(Pillow Talk 42)

The world is intensely personal at all times, through two decades of writing. The garden, the kitchen, the cobbled Dublin street: each is a metaphor surely, an image for the sociologist or critic to juggle with; but each is a lived place, an architecture built up around a set of very personal experiences or memories. The poem, the metaphor itself, is fulfilling an almost physically personal function: in Meehan it is the thing itself as well as its set of meanings. The images are organically attached and strenuously lived-in. The poems accumulate and blend over decades and seem part of a unified thought, the mosaic of single, twisting strip of DNA: in terms of poetry, a single meditation or Buddhist insight. Each Meehan book leaves the reader with an aroma of flowers and the memory of a struggle, but all tightly controlled by a mind at ease in a vortex of chaos. Not to understand this personal power in Meehan's work is to miss the point completely. There is a great still center, a sense of ease that comes from having filtered great personal pain, combined with an impulse toward mediation and empathy.

Meehan came into her voice, also, just at that worldwide political moment when Reagan and Thatcher's cruel view of history was ascending. The era of peace and love, the garden of theWhole Earth Catalog, the great experiments in personal life in West Cork or Southern California, were coming to an abrupt end. The war against the working class, the destruction of unions, the defeat of the miners and printers were all at hand. The poor could hope for nothing except their own solidarity and witness. Meehan's is one of the radical voices that sidled away from that eighties picket-line; she carries a radical placard, on her own behalf as well as others, into the self-satisfied territory of the agreed agenda. Her empathy with ordinary, unheroic suffering, her contempt for clap-trap, her technical skill as a poet all come together in collection after collection to strike an authentic new note in Irish poetry. The note is one of solidarity, lyrically expressed and painfully earned.

Her Ireland of the early eighties was the beginning of something else in poetry—a powerful creative impulse among women. The condition of passivity, of acceptance, so well described by Jane Cooper in her essay "Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread" was being swept away: "I saw clearly how hard it would be for me to make a lasting relationship, bring up children and 'live a full life as a woman' while being a committed writer. The women poets I read about were generally not known for their rich, stable sexual and family lives" (Maps and Windows 49). In the wake of Doris Lessing and Adrienne Rich came a battalion of strong female voices, from Carolyn Forché to Caitlín Maude, from Nel lMcCafferty to Eavan Boland. With the enemies of a full life, an interrogated life of the earthly and human spirit, ascending the thrones, Meehan's strong heart and political instinct flourished in that alternative spiritual company:

I'm not your muse, not that creaturein the painting, with the beautiful body,Venus on the half-shell. Canyou not see I'm an ordinary womantied to the moon's phases, bloodysix days in twenty eight?

(Pillow Talk 24)

Empathy, and its political dynamic, began with Meehan as complete self-knowledge that rotated outward, embracing others: mothers, sisters, lovers, neighbors, ghosts, and fellow poets. History is her story, but with a thousand parallel stories running concurrently. The work is saturated with the lives of others; the poet meditates at the still center of a fairly dramatic and rowdy urban milieu: the noise from the poems is the true narrative of that milieu. The poems survive everything, including her work of continuing, practical solidarity. Between 1984 and the present day Meehan has written for TEAM, the theatre-in-education company, for inner-city literacy group, for the Combat Poverty Agency, for dancers, choreographers, and for women in Mountjoy Prison. Such solidarity has a deep center:

Little has come down to me of hers,a sewing machine, a wedding band,a clutch of photos, the sting of her handacross my face in one of our wars

when we had grown bitter and apart.Some say that's the fate of the eldest daughter.

(The Man Who Was Marked by Winter 17)

I emphasize the word "solidarity" yet again. It is more than merely giving witness; it is certainly beyond the confines and luxuries of a literary project. It doesn't require big words or banal academic interrogations. It is a matter of listening, gauging the tone and volume of the lyrics, and therefore weighing the weight of one human soul. It was the absence of this soul, the weighty application of a soul-filled counterbalance, that skewed the nature of Irish poetic practice from the very beginning. In the Ireland invented and patented by Daniel O'Connell, Douglas Hyde, and W. B. Yeats there are certain key elements missing. As late as the 1920s Constance Countess Markievicz, speaking in the Dáil, had this to say:

The question of votes for women, with the bigger thing, freedom for women and the opening of professions to women, has been one of the things that I have worked for and given my lifelong influence and time to procuring all my life whenever I got an opportunity. I have worked in Ireland, I have even worked in England, to help women to obtain their freedom. I would work for it anywhere, as one of the crying wrongs of the world, that women because of their sex should be debarred from any position or any right that their brains entitle them to hold.

(Dáil Éireann Debates, 1922)

"That their brains entitle them to hold": is it not extraordinary how difficult it has been to communicate that clear and simple message, a perception at the very core of the European enlightenment and a truth burned into history on the barricades of Paris and the charred buildings of Dublin, 1916? Literary practice, the industry of imagining, writing, editing, and publishing, has been dominated by males, many in Holy Orders, since the foundation of the Irish state. A lesser state than had been imagined was brought into being. A black veil was thrown over the serious lives of women, although women's work was everywhere, on the far mand in scholarship.

The best poetry must be allowed to surface: as it surfaces we are exposed to half the story of the world. When one thinks of the poets at work in Ireland now—Máire Mhac an t Saoí, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, Medbh McGuckian, Kerry Hardie, Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, Liz O'Donoghue, and Leanne O'Sullivan—one could make a strong case that at this very moment in Ireland there are more good female poets than male poets. Does it matter? Well, it's interesting; and one would also expect this excellence to be reflected in all the new or renewed anthologies of Irish poetry to be published in the next two decades. I wonder, how many female editors will be appointed to oversee these general anthologies? (I mean general anthologies, not anthologies of women's writing.) The intellectual and vocational conditions of intelligent women haven't really changed that much since Nuala O'Faolain wrote down her memories of Irish academe in the 1960s. Men drink together. After closing time, men appoint each other to great schemes. Women seemed to sit at another table and wait. But this "sitting" and "waiting"may be a male illusion, a male-centered illusion caused by the noise of Irishmen clamoring with male solidarity. Keeping Countess Markievicz's words in mind, Irishwomen may claim the attention to which their brains entitle them. Well, the proof of the pudding will be in the next five anthologies of Irish poetry, won't it? Discuss.

In this context, it is well to remind ourselves that in Meehan's "Manulla Junction" the woman, too, can be the photographer as well as the subject:

Why assign her victim? Why deduce grieffrom her shiny shoes, from the fresh budded leaf?What drew Father Browne to her radiant face –the still centre of the photo – draws me too, intense

focus for the drama of the shot,energy radiating outward from her now bleached face. Notthat she's aware of him or his camerastill less posterity's gaze that recruits her to my opera.

I want to give her a happy ending.

(Dharmakaya 43)

Here Meehan is the photographer, the holder of that recording instrument, who connects in high solidarity with the emigrant woman in Father Browne's photograph, as she had connected earlier with women in the sewing factory, with labor robbed of its dignity in "The Exact Moment I Became a Poet" (Dharmakaya 24) or as she connected, literally, with "The Trapped Woman of the Internet":

                                             . . . And the onlyrescue I can mount is to shift websitefrom Asiatic Babe Cutie Triple XXX Sexpot.           Yet much as I want I cannot leave herrest. She bothers me all the mundane livelong day.

(Dharmakaya 52)

I am aware that what may be read as profound trauma in politics, national and gender tensions may actually be "acrimony of the bowels," as she writes in Painting Rain (2009). There is such self-knowledge in Meehan, such a Yeatsian depth, and such humane blood, that one has to allow oneself to be carried with her later work into deeper, psychic, intensely personal regions where the human condition, the discomfort of being in the world, is encountered:

I pull the door behind me firmly closed.The past is a lonely country.There are no charts, no maps.All you read is hearsay, as remoteas the myths of this Greek islandwhere one small boat putters out to seain a blaze of morning sunlightdragging my attention in its wake.

(Painting Rain 80)

The memory is important because of the great wisdom and authority of the one who remembers. This is the power of Meehan's work: there is life, but there is earned and studied wisdom, a wise ear and a wise mouth for poetry. In "Troika" she writes "I wonder even then how it all came to this" (77) while in "Prayer for the Children of Longing" she writes of "streets that gave them visions and dreams /That promised them everything /That delivered nothing" (47). It is between the street and the nothing that Meehan has negotiated a unique passage for the craft of her poetry. It is an assembly of memories, yes, a Senate of representations on behalf of mothers, sisters, children, Joanne Breen, the flat in Sean Mac Dermott Street, the room where someone died, the Greek island, the garden, but this assembly is addressed by a learned Senator of posterity, a poet.

Meehan's constituency is poetry; she was born there, born as a poet before political awareness grew, but nurtured year after year by that growing solidarity. As her books accumulate her talent grows stronger, her imagination finer and more robust, her verse-craft more crafty and elaborate. It is the weather of unbroken solidarity, the temperature reached early upon the eighties barricades, that animates her every poem. She has grown from a gifted lyric poet to a wise-woman of swallows, willows, squid, and pickled limes.

Meehan's psychology, her emotional weather, her deepest political being are an essential part of the success and power of her poems. This is the very core of her achievement to date. It is amazing how deaf some people are to the unassailable, lyrical sounds made by faith and solidarity: "O somewhere there is a beautiful myth of sorting, / of sifting through a mountain of dross to find the one seed / whose eventual blossom is such would make a god cry." (Dharmakaya 32). The secret is in the finding of that one, indisputable "eventual blossom." A whole series of factors must work together to make that happen. In Pillow Talk (1994) Meehan has written of the nature of racism, alienation, and betrayal, in a prose poem that reveals a great deal about her political instincts and her sense of common humanity. In "On Being Taken for a Turkish Woman" she is deliberately given incorrect instructions by a Berliner:

I am considering the nature of betrayal and the circumstances in an Izmir bazaar, his eye suddenly caught by the blue luminescence of the stone that now adorns my left ear. The sign of one who's chosen the path of the warrior rather than the path of the lover, he said when he gave it to me.

I'm trying to work all this out in iambic, trying to find the strong steady pulse of my walkabout in words. But there's too much danger at the edges, and I need all my concentration for reading the street. Visibility is down to a few yards and I've noway of knowing what will come at me next out of the mist.

(Pillow Talk 46)

For Meehan, liberation is truly a praxis, a transforming reflection and action upon the world. There is no distance between the pen and the stretcher, between the act of personal imagining and the work of literacy among women in the inner city. Everything coheres into a single, rich karma, a grace of being and a zen of Irish street politics that is way beyond the comprehension of poets or critics with a more traditional, reactionary view of the poet's task. As Denise Levertov wrote in The Poet in the World, "There was a little song of nonsense words my mother told me [my father] had sung to my sister when she was very young. She repeated it to me as she remembered it, and I understood what she did not understand, that it was a song about a well, and about the wet stones around the wellhead" (207). Paula Meehan is a wise and pivotal Irish poet, not only because she knows more than her mother but because she had that mother:

mother wearing a necklace of skullswho calls into beingby uttering the namemater logos metric

(Dharmakaya 56)

Both she and her mother, and all of those mother's meanings, stand before us as we sit to listen and learn. Exiled in our own way, non-nationals in the unheated waiting-room of a national poetry, the poet Meehan speaks to us directly and urgently of the ultimate homecoming when words are committed to the page. We learn to read because of the sheer integrity, the solidarity, the power of empathy, in her words:

                                             Late November, the darkchill of the room, Christmas looming and none of us well fixed.We bend each evening in scarves and coats to the workof mending what is broken in us. Without tricks,

without wiles, with no time to waste now, we plantwords on these blank fields. It is an unmapped world. . . ."Literacy Class, South Inner City"

(Dharmakaya 51)