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.

'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

'In Painting Rain 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'. Each poem is powerful on its own, demanding and holding the white space of each page, but the cumulative effect is one of great wisdom and authority. Meehan had that special grace from the start, but now immensities have crystallized around each lyric she writes. Don't miss this work: Painting Rain is her finest book yet.' - Thomas McCarthy

'These are poems fuelled by a fierce perception and generosity of spirit, joyfully and sorrowfully open to human frailty, passion, the natural world - what it means to be human. Even in the darkness of grief and loss Paula Meehan celebrates life with a visceral, flaying attention. It is as if anger, grace and wit have been hammered white-hot into the finest shining tool and ornament. ' - Maura Dooley