Painting Rain

by Meehan, Paula

• ISBN13: 9781930630420
• ISBN10: 1930630425
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-01
• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin in 1955 and currently resides there with her husband, the writer and critic Theo Dorgan. Meehan was raised in two famous working-class districts of Dublin, before graduating from Trinity College and Eastern Washington University. She is a member of Aosdána and is the current Ireland Chair of Poetry. Winner of the Lawrence O’ Shaughnessy Award for Poetry (2015), Paula Meehan has won several other prizes such as The Martin Toonder Award (1995), the Butler Literary Award (1998), and the Denis Devlin Award (2002). She has written six award-winning poetry collections, and she has also written plays for both children and adults. Wake Forest University Press has published two of Paula Meehan’s volumes, Dharmakaya (2002) and Painting Rain (2009). Meehan has also conducted writing workshops with inner city communities and in prisons, as well as universities.