Recent praise for Painting Rain:

“Paula Meehan’s Painting Rain displays one of our best poets at her most eloquent. These are poems which both confront and celebrate the world we inhabit, but they also manage in their rhythms to transcend that world.”  -  Colm Tóbín The Irish Times (“Books of the Year 2009″)

“In her two recent American publications from Wake Forest University Press’s distinguished series of volumes by Irish poets, Dharmakaya and Painting Rain, Paula Meehan has made it clear that she is one of the most acutely intelligent, bravely perceptive, formally resourceful, emotionally responsible poets writing today. … In accomplished verse ranging from the villanelle and sonnet to carefully executed freer forms, Meehan’s poetry is passionate in its recoveries of an almost lost, always threatened self that knows its limits through suffering, through embrace, through revelation.”  Jordan Smith, Antioch Review

Poetry and the Power of Healing: from the Irish Times Oct. 6.  Read here:

Hear Paula Meehan read at the County Library in Tallaght for All-Ireland Poetry Day. The audience included students from St. Aidan’s Community School, Brookfield and students from Old Bawn Community School as well as a number of local writers. The event was streamed live to the Internet. Poetry Ireland arranged this session with Paula Meehan and the Arts Council funded the event. Listen here:

Meehan’s play CELL in New York:

from the review in The Irish Emigrant:
Irish wit found even in a ‘Cell’

Play explores dark side of society in psychological drama

By Matthew Crow

The underbelly of Irish female society is currently being explored on a New York stage. Fallen Angel Theater Company is continuing its run of the play “Cell,” by award winning Irish playwright Paula Meehan at the 1st Irish theater festival in New York City from now until Oct. 4.

The play revolves around four Irish women in prison, and the power struggle they go through in their shared cell.

“It’s a psychological power-play thriller between four women who basically are working to take control of the cell,” said Fallen Angel’s founder Aedin Moloney, who also features in the play.

To read the rest of the review click here:

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from the review in The Fab Marquee:
Review – Cell (1^st Irish)

By Karen Torora-Lee

“I hear you sit right on the stage with the actors,” one woman said to those of us gathered in the Gene Frankel lobby, waiting to take our seats for Paula Meehan’s Cell. “You just sit right there in the prison cell like you’re part of the show.” A man, leaned over and said to me “Prison? I thought this show was going to be about phones”. “Really?” I replied, “I thought it was going to be about molecular biology.” Cell, however, set in a women’s prison in Dublin and populated with the disenfranchised women of Ireland is quite different.

For the rest of the review read here.

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Amanda Sperry (November, 2008): An Interview with Paula Meehan

From the interview:

Q. Will you discuss the title of your forthcoming collection, Painting Rain? What does “painting rain” evoke for you, and what does it say about the way in which you form poetry? Why the change in title from The Wolf Tree to Painting Rain?

A. The title comes from a small poem called ‘Coda: Payne’s Grey’ which is at the very end of the book. “I am trying to paint rain …” runs the line. It may be the rainy summer seasons we’ve been having (we’d floods in July this year in Ireland); rainy summer seasons that segue out of rainy spring seasons and into rainy autumn seasons has rain very much on my mind. Payne’s Grey is a colour beloved by watercolourists, a mixture of ultramarine and black that is useful for clouds, for shadows, for mists, for sheets of rain, for drizzles and mizzles, for downpours, for lake depths and seas on cold winter days and is especially useful, I like to think, for shifting boundaries between this world and the otherworld of memory and dream.
The whole manuscript, up to quite late in the process had been called The Wolf Tree after a poem I got when I read a line in Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Slashes’ in her marvellous collection The School Among the Ruins. Her line is “In wolf tree see the former field”. Wolf trees, also known as veteran trees over this side of the Atlantic, are the oldest trees in what may have been once an open field, or simply the oldest trees in the forest. They are unrestricted in their growth being the first in to the habitat so they can grow in whatever way they desire, sending laterals out into the air. Subsequent generations of trees, the wolf trees’ descendants or another invading species have to compete for light and so tend not to have laterals, to grow straight up in competition for the light.
Eavan Boland, to whom my book is dedicated, mentioned the title rang a bell for her; I subsequently discovered that Wolf Tree, Alison Calder’s first poetry collection, was published by Coteau Books in 2007 in Canada. I think if Calder’s had not been such a fine strong collection I would have gone ahead anyway, on the basis that all’s fair in love, war, and poetry, but out of respect for her work I changed the title. There was also an historical novel of the same title by Helen Rucker, published in 1960 and set in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest and in high society circles of San Francisco.