Catherine Ann Cullen’s Storm Damage weaves personal, historical and mythological threads to create a book that celebrates the power of words, not least in challenging times. Whether charting the events of family life or responding to objects in Dublin’s North Inner City Folklore Collection, these poems and songs have the shadow, and occasionally the light, of history cast over them. A health crisis lends Storm Damage added resonance, but Cullen’s power is as a singer of hurts – and salves – beyond the merely personal. In Storm Damage she fearlessly embraces the role.
“Each poem an exhilarating discovery.”
— Cáit O’RiordanA marvellous ‘chrysalis of words’: lyrical poems of love, loss and healing, to reread and savour.
— Margaret Kelleher
STORM DAMAGE
i.m. Mam
When I went to collect my bicycle
from the hospital where you’d withered,
the storm had recast it as an autumn sculpture.
The grooves between frame and tyres were choked.
Wheels vanished into flares of amber and yellow.
Here and there, a green frond interlaced the spokes.
It almost took my breath away
this blaze of light in the half-dark.
I took time to trundle my bike down the path,
loath to dislodge the gifted leaves too fast.
With each turn, they fell away, singly or in huddles:
behind me, a trail of fire,
before, the way home.
Storm Damage. Catherine Ann Cullen
140 x 216 mm. 84 pp
ISBN PB 9781915629470
ISBN HB 9781915629463
October 2025
Cover artwork, ‘Ginkgo Leaves in Red’ by Nina Browne, by kind permission.
