POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
Dennis O'Driscoll's fifth collection contains poems in which his cool and unflinching vision lends a pungent originality to his treatment of love and death as well as to subjects as diverse - and improbable - as economic boom, business travel and Alzheimer's disease. By contrast, the book also contains more lyrical and personal poems, including the tender and evocative childhood sequence with which the collection ends. `Weather Permitting' follows O'Driscoll's widely praised `Quality Time' (1997) which contained his celebrated long poem, `The Bottom Line', described by Alan Brownjohn in `The Sunday Times' as `devastatingly accurate, and scary'.
Born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary in 1954, Dennis O'Driscoll works for Irish Customs in Dublin. Also well known as a critic, he contributes to `Poetry Review', `Harvard Review', the `TLS' and many other journals in Britain, Ireland, the USA and Australia. `As the Poet Said', a selection of quotations from his long-standing `Poetry Ireland Review' column, was published in 1997.
