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. 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 forge an imaginative connection with contemporary victims of political injustice and discrimination, and a sequence 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.

"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