During the Covid-19 pandemic, eighteen thousand uncrossable kilometres lay between poet Majella Cullinane in Aotearoa New Zealand and her mother in Ireland, a distance unbridgeable even by phone as Cullinane’s mother’s language was lost to dementia. Meantime calls and keens across this terrible distance.
With attentiveness, tenderness and extraordinary vulnerability, these poems speak directly to personal experience while also addressing a wider world shadowed and altered by illness, where everything once familiar and coherent is disintegrating, in flux, uncertain and strange.
These poems are works of vigil and devotion, breathed into existence by a daughter who could not be at the bedside of her beloved, dying parent. Personal and universal in its themes, the poems in Meantime possess a gravitas born of sorrow, steeped in love.
A warm and loving conversation about memory and forgetting, and a celebration of the power of voice to connect and heal, this is a collection for our times.
Majella Cullinane writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her second collection Whisper of a Crow’s Wing (Otago University Press and Salmon Poetry, Ireland) was chosen as The Listener’s Top Ten Poetry Books of 2018. Her writing has been published internationally, and she has held residencies and fellowships in Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand. She was awarded a Copyright Licensing New Zealand Grant (2019) and a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant (2021) to complete Meantime. She graduated with a PhD in Creative Practice from the University of Otago in 2020. She lives in Kōpūtai, Port Chalmers with her family.
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