Painting Rain

$11.95

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.

Reviews

“Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing—a vocational poet of courage and integrity. Already much-loved and admired far beyond the shores of her native Ireland, Meehan advances her claim on our hearts and minds with Painting Rain. From present-day Dublin to Ancient Greece, the myths and flawed heroes of her poems give back to us our own lives, counted out in illuminated moments of joy, pain, love, and memory.”
– Carol Ann Duffy

“Paula Meehan makes music that is a powerful confluence of themes: a field lost to a housing development, a north wind that whines through the dunes, an Irish mother whose daughters ‘taught their mother barring orders and legal separation.’ Once again Meehan has illuminated this new landscape of Dublin and its hinterland with insights and grace notes. . . . Don’t miss this work: Painting Rain is her finest book yet.”
– Thomas McCarthy

“Nine years in the making, Painting Rain conveys the range of Meehan’s preoccupations. . . . The collection demonstrates Meehan’s wonderful command of technique. Sonnets, tankas (an ancient Japanese poetry form), sequences, brief lyrics in free verse, the subtle use of rhyme: Meehan can do it all.”
– Women’s Review of Books