Leland Bardwell, The Fly and the Bedbug ; Paula Meehan, Return and No Blame;  Julie O’Callagan, Edib

The Fly and the Bedbug by Leland Bardwell, Beaver Row Press, £3 paperback, £6 hardback.
Return and No Blame by Paula Meehan. Beaver Row Press, no price given.
Edible Anecdotes by Julie O'Callaghan. Dolmen Press, £4.

Beaver Row Press deserve to be congratulated for publishing Leland Bardwell and Paula Meehan. These two books bear the impression of vigorous and distinct personalities, through which the reader enters worlds that are interesting, highly-coloured and densely populated as well as utterly personal. I have not come across Paula Meehan's verse before, whereas I have known and admired Leland Bardwell's for several years; but to see her work, widely known from magazines and readings, collected in a book for only the second time should be an event at least parallel in importance to a first collection.
     The Fly and the Bedbug contains poems from the Sixties to the Eighties, some pre-dating her first book, The Mad Cyclist. 'Lullaby' is from the time when she was publishing in the Holy Door and Arena:

Lullaby sing lullaby
To my sweet baby in his cradle
Your daddy s gone but what is worse
I wish that I had left him first ...

Very often women are at the centre of her poems, often pinned down by illness, responsibility, death ('Mrs Katherine Dunne', 'Has Elizabeth shaved her head?') or literally immobilised: ('The Girl in a Box'):

Why does she lie there like that
Without moving, so frail, so spent?

Perhaps she is dead, they said
And away they went.

Women find themselves in absurd situations, and authority is made absurd by its reactions, as in 'The Lady that went on Strike against the early closing hours of the Iveagh Hostel'. But Leland Bardwell is writing about the human, not just the feminine condition. What interests her is the moment when the normal disintegrates, the victim's view of power and its structure. The sequence 'Prison poems' has this, on a hunger striker:

I do so want to live but my body
stringent in its monkey-martyrdom
withdraws into shadow-splendour.
It knows I am helpless now to order it ...

And, to a life prisoner:

Remember Jean-Paul Sartre and other soldiers of fortune
who lived on the rim of existence and survived;
the cinder that drops beneath the grate and stays alight,
the fish that lies beneath the shadow of a stone.

Her world is large, embracing the child, the prisoner, the hospital patient with a steadiness of focus that doesn't exclude caricature. Her poems offer, along with often stinging pictures of society and the human beings at odds with it, shifting, sometimes brilliant imagery and rhythmic energy:

   Sailor fill
your vessel, fill it like

a whale and skim skim
the waves like a waltz ...
                            (Has Elizabeth shaved her head?)

     There is a notable energy too in Paula Meehan's poems, coming in part from an intransigent adherence to her own identity and history. In 'The Women in the Backyard' she sets the scene in inner Dublin, between 'the innumerable flies at the smelly bins/And the pealing of the Angelus bells' and remembers with affection skipping rhymes and adult gossip:

You would hear strange tales of babies
And blood and screams in the night.
And stuff about strikes and lockouts too
And uncles of people you hardly knew ...

     'The Women in the Backyard' is the most successful section of the sequence, 'Echoes', which attempts to go beyond direct reporting and set experience in perspective. The conclusion is too strident for my taste:

In bed that night I loaded a gun
To stalk dreams across the cold sheets.

     In 'Intruders', a poem set in a Shetland island, incorporating jagged memories of Dublin, distance seems to make the two scenes work together in resolution. Identity for this poet seems to be a matter of not-always-convincing oppositions - between the native wildness and the civilised affectation, "the language that others have made" from 'Childless', a pastiche of Giolla Brighde McConmidhe. The conflict can rage, as in 'T.B. Ward':

. . . To listen to her you'd swear
She had a crucifix rammed up her hole.
The student doctors do a danse macabre
Exactly like a picture I once saw
In this rabid book about the Middle Ages
In the library ages ago of Trinity College ...

     Here the voice is urgent, the images clash and supersede each other, and the poem is a complete, harsh and weighty statement. If her work in this book is occasionally uneven, she certainly convinces the reader that

To live at the centre of something so vast
As the thing I live at the centre of
Requires a specific courage ...
                                        ('Adriane's thread')

     Compliments to Beaver Row Press on these two volumes must unfortunately stop short on praising the production. The printing is good-looking (though with too many misprints in Return and No Blame) but the binding is poor and the covers cheap-looking, which at the price is unacceptable.
     Edible Anecdotes by contrast is packaged beautifully. The title, and the idea of writing twenty-six poems all about food, are jazzy and saleable, but it would be quite wrong to explain away the book's success as a triumph in marketing. Some of the poems in the title sequence are trivial make-weights, which in the end take from the effectiveness of genuinely incisive pieces like this one:

stiff-legged, heavy-footed, dim-witted,
dry-mouthed and hang-dogged at three a.m.
we climb from the car
after seven hours driving
and shiver as we yawn
in front of Howard Johnson's Cafeteria
squinting from the bright lights
beside truck drivers eating apple pie
we wait for our toasted cheese sandwiches
and french fries listening to country western music
examining the bird life on our sugar packets

She writes about food, never as a sensuous experience, as a measure rather of a particular kind of freedom - the consumer's - and a mobility and recognisable sameness that accompany it. Only the speaker of the final poem has ever experienced deprivation. She fails with him, as elsewhere, to make an individual idiom work as poetry; from

No meat onry lice
walk ar day and get no meat ...

to

oh yeah, it's an 'all-you-can-eat'
salad, buffet all right,
but did you notice that your rear-end
barely fits on those chairs ...

the voices are identikit stereotypes. The poet's own voice is deep, deliberately paced:

you make the refrigerator copy the lion
and our eyes starved of light
move across the shelves
hunting for the thing
our stomachs have always wanted
but never found ...

In the background throughout, as in all the last three quotations are the multiple anxieties which food relieves. There is also, alongside the awareness of the consumer's voracity, the awareness of the wish to be consumed, to be read like a book as in 'Bookworm', to be kept as a pet ('Thumbelina'), to be viewed as an object ('The Object'). Beyond the title-sequence, then, the book has a tough, complex unity. I am curious to know what the next production of her talent will be.