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Paula Meehan says that most of the poems she writes are “a way of going back into the past/ I cannot live with and by transforming that past/change the future of it”. And it’s true that so many of the poems in her book do draw on childhood memories of people and places, and highlight that the memories are not always good ones:

mother you terrorist
muck mother mud mother
you chewed me up
you spat me out

To be fair, this particular poem does end:

mother I stand
over your grave
and your granite headstone
and I weep

And this perhaps indicates a kind of coming to terms with what happened, with the reader getting an indication of that from other poems, such as ‘The View from Under the Table’, and its reference to “her belt and her beatings”. It was the grandmother, not the mother, who provided the comfort needed:

My grandmother’s hands come back to soothe
                                                                   me.
They smell of rain. They smell of the city.

They untangle my hair and smooth
my brow. There’s more truth

to those hands than to all the poems
in the holy books. Her gesture is home.

     It could be that what I’ve used so far gives the impression of Meehan being solely concerned with her own past and its impact on the present, but she can deal with other subjects. Kids collecting material for bonfires, a young man waiting for his girlfriend, the city streets and the coast and the country. Sometimes a little statement is made in a few short lines:

Self-seeding, stubborn, cute,
given half the chance they root

in a hair’s breadth gap in a brick,
or chimneypot. Or fallen into a crack

and left for a year they’re a shrub
tough and tenacious as your indigenous Dub.

When they break into blossom - so free, so
                                                        beautiful.
I name them now as flags of the people.

     I can’t pretend to have liked everything in this book. A few of the poems were too personal to work well, but on the whole I found that the quiet voice - and it is quiet, even when one senses rage below the surface - established itself in my mind and convinced me that something worthwhile was being said.