Pillow Talk: Poems

Paula Meehan's work tends to be very intimate and personal, and the work contained in Pillow Talk proves to be no exception. Stylistically, she is a lyrical, image-driven poet, often focusing on small details to create the overall picture, as in "My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis." Much of Meehan's writing is influenced by her early childhood spent in a neighborhood north of the Liffey. In an interview with John Hobbs which appeared in Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing (web site), she said, "The area I grew up in had all the attributes of a village. It was a fairly close-knit community, the last of the working class. All the traditional industries were in decline, so we were about to enter a world of no work and no hope. I don't want to romanticize it, because there were dark sides to the culture as well, but it was the end of this community as a stable, self-sustaining unit within the greater city....That village had an incredibly rich culture, at least in terms of the oral tradition....it's the context for many of these poems." This awareness of place and community can be seen clearly in many of Meehan's poems. For example, in "A Child's Map of Dublin," she writes, I walk the northside streets / that whelped me; not a brick remains / of the tenement I reached the age of reason in. Whole / streets are remade, the cranes erect over Eurocrat schemes / down the docks. There is nothing / to show you there, not a trace of a girl / in ankle socks and hand-me-downs, sulking / on a granite step when she can't raise the price of a film, / or a bus to the beach.This sort of writing appears often in Meehan's work. It roots her work very much in the present and conveys the impact of recent changes in Irish political, economic, and social life.