"None of us well fixed": Empathy and its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan's Poetry Thomas McCarthy An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 65-74 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362736 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 06-mccarthy-pp65-74:sample 9/29/09 10:26 PM Page 65 THOMAS M CCARTHY “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 pil - grimage 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 pack - aging, a book without blurb or biography, that fell upon us like an LP from Motown Detroit. Meehan’s was a voice both unexpected and unher - alded, 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 clowns In your private review. But when all is done and said Your swanlike women are dead, Stone dead. My women must be Hollow of cheek with poverty And the whippings of history! (Return and No Blame 27 ) 65 06-mccarthy-pp65-74:sample 9/29/09 10:26 PM Page 66 66 An Sionnach 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 scullery You wash and you rinse Crockery, cutlery. You stack them, you dry them. The doors and the floors Are 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 re - membered failures to cohere. It is a scarred witness of Irish life, yet deter - minedly 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 wit - ness. In “Woman Found Dead behind Salvation Army Hostel” Meehan sub - mits narrative to a double discipline. It is not just death, but an artist recording the image after “the beast who maimed her”: 06-mccarthy-pp65-74:sample 9/29/09 10:26 PM Page 67 Empathy and Its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan’s Poetry 67 You can make a quick sketch and 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 night dragged 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 vic - tims. 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 inor - ganic world. It is the very opposite, in fact, garlanded with herbs and flow - ers, with knowledge of husbandry and a sensitized awareness of the changing seasons. Of “Elder” she writes: I love its fecundity, its left alone self designing wildness, especially in June, the tomcat pungency of elderblossom reeking 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 room Among your choice 06-mccarthy-pp65-74:sample 9/29/09 10:26 PM Page 68 68 An Sionnach Of books and plants Carefully tended – Because none knows better than you How 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 garden passes judgement, but the eight foot high white foxgloves among the greys of 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 al - most physically personal function: in Meehan it is the thing itself as well as its set of meanings. The images are organically attached and strenu - ously 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 to - ward mediation and empathy. Meehan came into her voice, also, just at that worldwide political mo - ment when Reagan and Thatcher’s cruel view of history was ascending. The era of peace and love, the garden of the Whole Earth Catalog, the great experiments in personal life in West Cork or Southern California, were com - 06-mccarthy-pp65-74:sample 9/29/09 10:26 PM Page 69 Empathy and Its Aesthetic Power in Paula Meehan’s Poetry 69 ing 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 pas - sivity, of acceptance, so well described by Jane Cooper in her essay “Noth - ing 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 chil - dren and ‘live a full life as a woman’ while being a committed writer.