Enraptured Space: Gender, Class and Ecology in the Work of Paula Meehan by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick
Reviewed by Dawn Macdonald
In Enraptured Space, poet and literary scholar Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick offers a fascinating and at times frustrating analysis of the work of Irish poet Paula Meehan. Kirkpatrick is doing something quite cool here; she eschews the usual format of the dry, pseudo-objective, passive voice academic text and instead chooses to engage directly with Meehan through transcribed conversation and poetic dialogue.
Meehan is the much-lauded author of seven poetry collections, and served as Ireland Chair of Poetry (a post currently held by Paul Muldoon). She was a judge for the Griffin Prize in 2020, and has herself won many awards. Born in Dublin in 1955, she grew up within the socio-economic stratum that’s called “working class” but has increasingly found itself relegated to long-term unemployment in the neoliberal order. The excerpts from her poetic corpus that Kirkpatrick quotes in Enraptured Space would tend to fit within a lyric mode incorporating narrative elements. Lines are left-justified and often end-stopped. The ordinary rules of grammar and sentence construction apply. This is a poetry of clarity and purpose which takes language as a given, and seeks to affect the reader emotionally through anecdote and argument. Meehan is very good at this.
Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick is an American poet based at Appalachian State University, where she specializes in Irish literature. Her seven poetry collections foreground themes of human relationships with the animal world, and of embodied female experience. These interests shape her engagement with Meehan’s work. In the introduction to Enraptured Space, she quotes Meehan on the subject of literary criticism: “Poems are like mirrors. People look into them and the poem is reading them …; it reads what they bring to it[.]” In light of this, Kirkpatrick acknowledges, “This book is also a record of the ways that Meehan’s poems have read and continue to read me” (p. 3).
Through her readings of Meehan’s poems, and a series of interview segments following each section of the book, Kirkpatrick examines Meehan’s work through the lenses of class, gender, and an ecological viewpoint that posits a form of spiritual kinship between the human and Earth’s non-human species. “I have been arguing,” she writes, “that addressing [Meehan’s] work fully requires an expansive ecocritical frame, one that acknowledges the interconnections between exploitive economic systems, social inequities, and environmental degradation” (p. 88).
So far so good, and the class-based analysis reads as clear and well-founded. This section, titled “Witnessing Class Trauma,” argues that we can understand class-conditioned lives as traumatic in the sense that “individuals can be repeatedly wounded by unjust social structures and suffer continued psychic distress as a result” (p. 25). Poetry can be leveraged as a tool of transformation. Kirkpatrick quotes Meehan saying, “You can take even the very elements that oppress you and turn them into something powerful and good” (p. 41). Meehan writes about the ways literature and language can serve to devalue impoverished people, as when a well-meaning teacher offers learning as a path out: “… Attend to your books, girls, / or mark my words, you’ll end up / in the sewing factory. // It wasn’t just that some of the girls’ / mothers worked in the sewing factory / or even that my own aunt did, // and many neighbours, but / that those words ‘end up’ robbed / the labour of its dignity” (p. 35-36).
Kirkpatrick argues that Meehan’s treatment of women’s lives under conditions of economic inequality can be understood as ecofeminist, where ecofeminism holds that the socio-economic systems responsible for women’s oppression also lead to environmental degradation. Meehan’s relationship with the natural world is conditioned on her urban background, and many of the passages quoted by Kirkpatrick relate to nature through a domestic lens: gardens, fruits and vegetables and cuts of animal meat in the kitchen, bees in the yard. Kirkpatrick holds that Western culture views women as being closer to nature, and while this may be historically true I’m not convinced it’s currently the case—is Animal of the Muppets not gendered masculine? At times she seems to embrace the connection in ways that verge on gender essentialism. It may be that ecofeminism does uphold an essentialist view (I’m not an expert here) and there’s value in reclaiming ways of knowing and being that have in the past been derided as feminine. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that the analysis presented in this section invokes a construction of gender that is contentious.
The final two sections of the book, “Beyond Human Exceptionalism” and “The Shamanic Poet”, are in some ways the most interesting but also the most troubling. Meehan is a big fan of American poet Gary Snyder, who was active and influential from the Beat era through the 1990s and into the present. His interests in ecology and spirituality led him into Zen Buddhism, and also into what some consider an appropriative engagement with North American Indigenous worldviews. Snyder brought attention to the richness and beauty of Indigenous traditions among readers who might not otherwise have encountered them, but the line between appreciation and appropriation is not static. To hear two White-presenting poets in 2025 laying claim to a term like “shaman” feels uncomfortable, even shocking, to me as a reader here in Canada (and it may be that issues involving the use and transmission of Indigenous traditional knowledge are just a bit more on the radar for Canadians at this time).
Kirkpatrick gives the briefest of nods to the issue of appropriation, only to dismiss it: “If the use of the term shaman seems portentous and culturally appropriating in the context of modern and contemporary poetry, it’s important to remember that Meehan has always taken the long view of the role of the poet” (p. 151). But our acts of appropriation are not erased by our taking up any particular viewpoint; it’s necessary to spend extended time within the cultural communities whose knowledges we seek, and to acknowledge our mentors within those communities. Meehan is said to have taken inspiration for her “shapeshifting” and poems of “interspecies union” from Indigenous stories she encountered while studying at Eastern Washington University; it isn’t clear whether she connected with members of Pacific Northwest Indigenous communities during this time, nor are any specific persons or nations named here as sources of traditional knowledge. (Eastern Washington University recognizes the land of the Spokane Tribe and also its location in a shared space connected with Coeur d’Alene Tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the Kalispel Tribe, and the Nez Perce Tribe).
I totally get that as poets we at times feel ourselves to be in contact with a spiritual realm, and to speak in voices beyond our own. But the spiritual disciplines and knowledges of the shaman are not ours to pick up at will. It’s fair to note that the Irish have a complicated history with whiteness (not always having been seen as such) and with their own form of indigeneity—Meehan positions herself within a lineage going back to the “small dark people” of Paleolithic, pre-Christian Ireland. The spiritual practices of these peoples are not fully understood, and may well overlap with circumpolar shamanic traditions. But the nuance around this is only minimally addressed in the book we’re reading.
This book is laudable for breaking constraints of the academic genre, and for providing an opinionated treatment of an important living poet. Kirkpatrick is deeply and personally engaged with her subject; the work rings with vitality and passionate concern. Some aspects of the conversation between Kirkpatrick and Meehan may not sit well with readers attuned to the current Canadian discourse around Indigenous issues, and committed to pathways of reconciliation and decolonization. Still, to the extent that these conversations are reflective of Meehan’s self-concept as a poet, Kirkpatrick’s approach serves to powerfully illuminate the sources of this undeniably significant body of work.
About the Author
Kathryn Kirkpatrick is professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems, as well as the editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities and co-editor of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture.
About the Reviewer
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly at Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviewing for journals and for The Seaboard Review.
Book Details
March 2025
202pp
PB 978-1-959000-45-7
eBook 978-1-959000-46-4
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