The Other Now by Catherine Ann Cullen cover - Dedalus Press, poetry from Ireland and the world

By Catherine Ann Cullen

The Other Now

Catherine Ann Cullen’s interests in folklore, myth and popular song are everywhere evident in the poems she has published over the past decade. Collected as A Bone in My Throat (2007) and Strange Familiar (2013), her poems are drawn to the narrative turns and dramatic twists of stories that tell us much about ourselves – and on which our first efforts at making sense of the world are often based.

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All Poetry, Poetry from Ireland, Selected Poems

Description

Catherine Ann Cullen’s interests in folklore, myth and popular song are everywhere evident in the poems she has published over the past decade. Collected as A Bone in My Throat (2007) and Strange Familiar (2013), her poems are drawn to the narrative turns and dramatic twists of stories that tell us much about ourselves – and on which our first efforts at making sense of the world are often based.

The best of those earlier books is regathered here, together with a generous selection of new poems. These include timely celebrations of the life of Rosie Hackett and of the women of 1916, poems that make an imaginative connection with contemporary victims of political injustice and discrimination, and a sequence of poems that, through the haunting images left to us by the painter Caravaggio, seeks to eavesdrop on the voices hovering just this side of darkness as they contemplate the seven works of mercy.

 

The Other Now

As the guests dispersed
the stairs folded you in their zigzag hold
and your fairy godmother placed two sweets
in your upturned palms.

You pondered their wrappers,
slipped one lozenge into the kangaroo pouch of your dress,
and unwound the other from its foil.
‘I’ll eat this now,’ you said.
‘And what will you do with the other?’
Bending your white head to check it, you smiled,
‘I’ll keep that for the other now.’

Time and again I have flung
a net of words over that moment,
but it is always another now I capture,
never quite catching
the perfect size of you:
small for two, articulate,
hair gleaming like a dawn beach,
eyes combing the world.

And while I collect moments
in paper pockets,
how many have you piled up
like your darkening hair?

Is there one we share
or do I stand apart
sucking your phrases down
to a stain on my tongue
while you sit white on the stair
glossing the future?

“Cullen’s poems can be blatantly sensual, always sensitive, shadowed by ancient allusions, and sometimes defiant …. [Strange Familiar] leaves the reader perfectly sated, as after a feast of good words and fine company.”
— Australasian Journal of Irish Studies

Product Detail

  • ISBN: : 978 1 910251 23 2
  • Size: : 140 x 216 mm
  • Pages: : n/a
  • Published: : October 2016

About The Author

Author

CATHERINE ANN CULLEN was born in Drogheda in 1961. She is the inaugural Poet in Residence at Poetry Ireland and an award-winning poet, songwriter and children's writer. Catherine Ann Cullen has published three collections: A Bone in My Throat (Doghouse, 2007), Strange Familiar (Doghouse, 2013) and The Other Now (Dedalus Press, 2016). Two of her children’s books, The Magical, Mystical, Marvelous Coat (2001) and Thirsty Baby (2003), were published by Little, Brown in the US, the former winning a gold award for Poetry and Folklore. Her latest children’s book, All Better! Poems on Illness and Recovery (Little Island, 2019), was reimagined from Latvian. Catherine Ann Cullen has twice won the Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award, was joint first in the JoyceCycle Poetry Competition 2019 and has been shortlisted for many prizes including the Listowel Writers Week Irish Poem of the Year 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Middlesex University. She has presented at international conferences on ballads and on children’s literature, and published several chapters on broadside ballads. In 2020, Catherine Ann Cullen organised “Living Ghosts: A Tribute to Frank Harte in Poetry and Song” and curated Irish participation in the Irish Spanish Latin American Literary Festival. Her “Behind the Lines” series of videos, recorded during lockdown, has Irish poets discussing their own or favourite poems on the Leaving Certificate. Another lockdown project is a crowd-sourced rhyming alphabet of Dublin. She was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship 2018 and has received bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and Irish Writers Centre. Catherine Ann Cullen’s work as A&L Goodbody Writer in Residence in East Wall won her the nationwide B2A award of Best Use of Creativity in the Community 2017. She works on the Trinity Access Programmes and is a former producer for RTÉ Radio 1. (See catherineanncullen.wordpress.com)

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