“I read that every polar bear alive today has mitochondrial DNA from a common mother, /an Irish brown bear who once/roved out across the last ice age …” so Paula Meehan’s The Solace of Artemis begins its charismatic title poem, a touchstone for Meehan in its preoccupations with inheritance, nature and time.
Technology is faced down, “It has been a long hot morning with the children of the machine,/their talk of memory, of buying it, of buying it cheap, but I,/memory keeper by trade, scan time coded in the golden hive mind/ of eternity.
“Rove” is a verb particular to Meehan, a born rover, every poem steeped in adventure whether she’s “tracing the Soca River from her headwaters” (A Netchke for Barbara Korun) or sitting at the back of “Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s lectures,/ being a back-of-the-class-girl,/being a back-of-the-bus-girl, being just gone seventeen and measuring/the teachers who would lead me towards the light/ against my own inclination to be led astray.” (Alma Mater)
Dublin is the presiding spirit in fine new poems such as On Baldoyle Estuary or the evocative The First of February: Howth Head, “A man is fencing a place for the pigs/and the nougat smell of gorse mingles/with fresh dung from the ponies.” In Seven Stanzas for the Magdalene the ghost of young Meehan is writing “… in Miss Shannon’s class/An Old Boot Tells Its Story;/while they were scrubbing the sweat/ of sex, of fever, of blood,/the marks of labour, of birth…”
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Meehan illuminates the bridge between two harsh worlds, “In two big pillowcases,/I’d lug the family wash/along Sean McDermott Street;/ or in the new baby’s pram/ curtains and blankets and rugs/ wobbled over the cobbles/the year I turned eleven… the sad ones checking the wash,/their hands raw and mottled … the undersong/ of clicking rosary beads.”
Alongside the new poems, there are two previously published sequences, For the Hungry Dead (a response to the Hades episode of Joyce’s Ulysses) and Museums (commissioned for the Dublin Tenement Museum) which begins, “Surrender as you enter through their door;/ know all are equal here: in Time’s brute trust/we are held — the quick, the dead, the blest, the curst.” (Invocation)
Fierce and vital, Meehan’s haunted poems are talismans held against personal loss and our changing, darkening world.
