The Man Made of Rain

Kennelly's book-length poem written after his quadruple bypass surgery is a visionary work inhabiting the shadowlands between life and death. It was published in simultaneously in hardback, paperback and audio cassette formats. Now out of print, it is included in Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

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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 book-length 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. It was published in simultaneously in hardback, paperback and audio cassette formats. Now out of print, it is included in Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.

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. 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…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.’