Geomantic by Paula Meehan (review)

Paula Meehan’s seventh and latest poetry collection, Geomantic, develops the concerns of her previous volumes, bringing new formal expression to issues of class trauma, ecological crisis, and gender politics. After the extended eulogies of Painting Rain (2009), Geomantic employs a spare and supple form from both the exigencies of life in a public role and the lived experiences of social and political struggle, the inner life always informed by soundings from the outer. Among other influences, Meehan describes these eighty-one nine-line poems., in which most lines comprise nine syllables per line as formally inspired by Seamus Heaney’s “Postcard from Iceland.”

Meehan took up her post as Poetry Professor of Ireland shortly after Heaney’s death, and her choice of form became both a tribute to him as well as a support to herself, “Seamus’s hand that I could grab.” She has also located the formal structure of the book in the memorial quilts for the youth lost to drug addiction in Dublin’s inner-city communities; in this sense, the volume became a counter-commemorative act in a year of official celebrations of the Easter 1916 Rising. And in a late poem in Geomantic, “The Quilt,” we also find this patchwork volume’s deep resonances with women’s communal work, “my grandmother’s quilt I slept under / the long and winding nights of childhood.” Finally, somewhere between the brevity and accreted histories of the haiku and the imperialist-inflected argument of the sonnet, Meehan finds in the nine-line poem employed by Spenser, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Larkin, and Lowell a middle way: she registers the influences of her mentor from the United States’ west coast, Gary Snyder, with his Zen Buddhist training in Japan, as well as of her early studies as a student of the classical myths of Greece (the country where the volume ultimately lands). Indeed, the closing poem of Geomantic, “The Island,” is set in one of Meehan’s spiritual homes on the island of Ikaria in Greece. Her early training as a classicist finds lived expression through her months of embodied writing on that island and communion with its rhythms: “At home again on Ikaria, / our own bee-loud glade.” This opening line of Meehan’s final poem in the volume manages to name not only Greece, but also Yeats and the Irish literary tradition (especially “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”), as well as the influence of the American Romantic tradition in Yeats’s echoing of Thoreau’s Walden.

There are new notes for Meehan sounded in this volume, including powerful poems on aging like “The Age of Embrocations and Naps,” “The Old Professor,” and “The Hands.” There is also a widening of the representation of sexuality with the inclusion of poems of same-sex love such as in “The New Regime,” “The Withdrawal,” and possibly “The Sea Cave.” And some familiar themes in Meehan’s work are deepened. Geomantic’s unapologetic anti-rationalist currents pick up that powerfully generative aspect of Yeats’s life and work and bring it fully forward, not only in the book’s title, but also in poems like “The Hexagram” and “The Handful of Earth.” This latter poem insists on a living, responding more-than-human world, a perspective that permeates her sense of poetry and its role in the world. In an interview with Jody Allen Randolph at UCD just before the release of Geomantic, Meehan observed that literary critics are often unaware of how much of themselves they reveal in their own writing. “Poems are like mirrors,” she stated. “People look into them and the poem is reading them, their education, their vocabulary, their emotional tenor; it reads what they bring to it.” In an era when master narratives and master plans feel palpably insufficient, Meehan’s poems in this volume as in others evoke a humility that should, in turn, humble us as readers, critics, and fellow poets.

Her assertion of the wily agency of the poem itself...