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'.