PAULA MEEHAN’S poetry has always been shadowed with an awareness that life is no picnic. The privations of an upbringing in the streets and tenements of Dublin have featured in many of her best-known poems, such as 'A Child’s Map of Dublin'. But the imagination always wins out; and a father we know from her other poems as someone who does not always succeed in the daily struggle to make ends meet can appear transformed in 'My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis', where he becomes 'suddenly radiant, / a perfect vision of St Francis, / made whole, made young again, / in a Finglas garden'.

Meehan’s new book, Painting Rain, reveals a temperamental disinclination to be anything but direct. In her elegy, 'Hannah, Grandmother', her granny’s decades-old advice about what to say in the Confessional booth seems remarkably prescient about recent revelations of clerical abuse: 'Tell them priests nothing . . . / Keep your sins to yourself. / Don’t be giving them a thrill. / Dirty oul feckers'.


Characters from the poet’s own past are alive in many of the poems, and she does not shy away from describing troublesome family history. Memories tug at her even as she writes 'I pull the door behind me firmly closed'. And an elegiac sense extends to the changes Ireland herself is undergoing, as more and more land gets paved over and built upon, even as it now becomes clear that many of these newly built houses will remain tenantless for the foreseeable future.

The first poem in the book, 'Death of a Field', is among its most memorable. Paula Meehan has a gift for simply-put formulations, such as this poem’s first line: 'The field is lost the morning it becomes a site'. She has a keen awareness of how the human and natural worlds interact. 'In wildness lies the salvation of the earth,' Thoreau famously wrote; Meehan makes clear how little encouragement nature needs to flourish and to enhance our own sense of being alive. In some settings the commonest weeds or wildflowers can be as life-enhancing as a forest of rhododendrons encountered on a trek through the Himalayas: 'The end of the field is the end of the hidey holes / Where first smokes, first tokes, first gropes / Were had to the scentless mayweed'.

Meehan has what many poets lack, a sense of humour – and there is nothing po-faced about her approach to environmental issues. In 'Six Sycamores', commissioned by the OPW as part of the Per Cent for Art Scheme, she riffs on the Park Superintendent’s report on the damage caused on Stephen’s Green during the Easter Rising: '6 of our waterfowl were killed or shot, 7 of the garden seats broken and about 300 shrubs destroyed'. Her poem carries a title that still has me chuckling: 'Them Ducks Died for Ireland'.