Chapter 21 - Paula Meehan and the Public Poem

Summary

Over many decades, the poetry of Paula Meehan has given a voice to urban (Dublin) working-class experience, and in doing so, to paraphrase Yeats on Synge, expressed a life that had never before found expression in poetry. This is Meehan’s world, yet her world contains so much more too, in poems that encompass Buddhism, environmental concerns, and the classical world. Class consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of Meehan’s artistic vision, rather than a thematic add-on, and critical engagement with her work requires a decisive reorientation of conventional aesthetic categories. A key piece of revisionism present in the poems is Meehan’s critique of domestic space: as against convention, it is often public spaces that are welcoming, where domestic spaces are fraught with tension and violence. To her critique of domestic spaces and class politics, Meehan has notably added in her recent work a sophisticated strain of ecopoetics, taking us beyond human exceptionalism and into a deeper realm of connection with the natural world.