Painting Rain

Paula Meehan

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847770011
• eBook ISBN: 9781847775986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Painting Rain explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape a world. Hers is an ambitious meditation, from that point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet. The home, the city's heart, neglected suburban battlegrounds, all are shot through with visionary light. In poems of loss, hymns to the empty world, celebrations of people and place, Meehan confronts the darkness that everywhere threatens. These are poems that sustain belief in the power of language to reveal, interrogate and heal.

Troika

1 How I Discovered Rhyme

Not long back from London

my father had done a deal with a man

key money down on a house

in Bargy Road, East Wall,

an illegal Corporation tenancy

in those days of no work, no roof,

no hope, no time like the present

to come home with three small children

and another on the way to what

was familiar at least. Dublin rain

and Dublin roads and Dublin streets

and Dublin pubs and Dublin pain.

Mayblossom in the park and empty pockets.

I think it was then my mother gave up:

pre-natal, post-natal who knows now.

They are so young, my mother and father,

to me who has grown old

in their light, in their shade.

They have too much on their plate –

including Ucker Hyland’s chickens.

Part of the deal for the house

was to mind this man’s chickens.

He kept them in the back yard

in makeshift crates and lofts.

Sporadically he’d deliver sacks of feed.

We’d have pots of popcorn every night

to Felix the Cat and to Bolek and Lolek

and the birthpangs of Irish Television.

We settled in. We fed the hens.

The man came. He took the eggs.

He’d wring the odd neck.

He wore two overcoats

belted by a length of rope.

And then a letter: the Eviction Notice.

Some neighbour had ratted us out.

There were rows, recriminations,

slammed doors, my father silent.

The stay in Bargy Road ended

on a bitter winter’s day,

the Tolka low and the tang of rot.

We came home from school to bailiffs

boarding up the windows, to all

we had on show in the garden,

paltry in the dying light –

a few sticks of furniture,

the mattress with its shaming stain

nearly the shape of Ireland,

the Slot TV, our clothes in pillowcases

and our Christmas dolls grubby

and inadequate on the grass.

My mother was frantically chasing the chickens;

we put down our satchels and joined in.

My father was gone for the lend

of a van or a cart. The streetlights

came on and here comes

the henman around the corner –

Ucker Hyland! Ucker Hyland! –

coats flapping and oaths spitting from his big lips

and all of us then round and round the garden

the winter stars come out and

feathers like some angelic benison

settling kindly on all that we owned.

2 A Reliable Narrative

Why my maternal, and much feared, uncle should visit

me now is a mystery. Both he and my mother dead,

me alone on the side of a mountain in Ikaria

a sanctuary sacred to a god of healing, Asklepius.

I was gathering herbs all morning, then sat

gazing out to sea in a half dream.

Hot springs with a sulphurous whiff,

the rocks around them a deep orange,

roil into the sea in a wraith of steam.

He comes as large as life and twice as ugly.

I put him down here in the hope he’ll leave me be:

I must have brought him with me, packed

in my rucksack with Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths.

*

I’m thirteen: my mother is sending me across the city

with Christmas presents for his children,

(all nine daughters – two sons he has yet to sire,

the only reason, he says, he has all those daughters,

trying for boys!)

I’ve to get

two buses with my parcels and the few bob for his wife,

a dark beauty with sad eyes and many tired sighs.

We wouldn’t have had that much ourselves

and I’m not to tell my father who’s barred him

from the house, barred all mention of his name,

the way he’d turn up drunk and roaring.

We’d be under the covers shaking

or slipping out the back way to avoid him,

the way he’d pull our panties or pyja...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Death of a Field
• Not Weeding
• Tanka
• Deadwood
• At Dublin Zoo
• On Howth Head
• ‘She didn’t know she was dying but the poems did’
• Hagiography
• The Following Message Will Be Deleted From Your Mailbox
• Sea
• Nomad Heart
• Six Sycamores
• Her Void: A Cemetery Poem
• In Memory, Joanne Breen
• Snowdrops
• Cora, Auntie
• Peter, Uncle
• Hannah, Grandmother
• A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write
• Prayer for the Children of Longing
• The Age of Reason
• Bad Fairy
• First Blood
• When I Was a Girl
• Shoes
• A Stray Dream
• Kippe
• Old Skin
• Quitting the Bars
• Note from the Puzzle Factory
• Who’d Be a Dog?
• Valentine
• Teaching ‘Kubla Khan’ to the FÁS Trainees at the Recovery through Art, Drama, and Education Project
• A Change of Life
• The First Day of Winter
• Single Room with Bath, Edinburgh
• From Source to Sea
• Zealot
• Etch
• Flight JIK Olympic Airlines 016 to Ikaria, Greece
• Troika
• Pangur Bán Reincarnate
• St John and My Grandmother – An Ode
• Hearth Lesson
• The Mushroom Field
• Archive
• My Brother Becomes a Man
• At Shelling Hill
• The Wolf Tree
• Coda: Payne’s Grey
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Paula Meehan from Carcanet Press Dharmakaya
• Copyright