Description: Brendan Kennelly's poetry has always taken on the mantle of the outcast, revealing as well as reviling, as The Man Made of Rain clearly shows. This new long poem is a departure for Kennelly, a visionary work written out of the body, out of the self, out of the shadowlands between life and death.

Brendan Kennelly writes: 'I had major heart surgery, a quadruple bypass, in October 1996. The day after the operation I had a number of visions... I saw a man made of rain. He was actually raining, all his parts were raining slant-wise and firmly in a decisive, contained way. His raineyes were candid and kind, glowing down, into, and through themselves. He spoke to me and took me on journeys. His talk was genial, light and authoritative, a language of irresistible invitation to follow him wherever he decided to go, or was compelled by his own inner forces to go...

'He led me to different places (I call them "places") such as my father's grave, inside my father's bones, the land of no-language, the place where scars are roads through difficult territories, provinces of history and memory, the place of cold, true cold, and what is that?

'The man made of rain would not leave me until I let his presence flow in the best and only poem I could write for him. Though I appear in the poem, or what I recognise as my "own" voice sounds through it, the poem is essentially a homage to his presence, a map of his wandering discoveries, and an evidence of my inadequate witnessing of those discoveries and that presence. He is a real presence in the poem; I am more an absence longing to be a presence...'

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