Catherine Ann Cullen

Catherine Ann Cullen is an Irish Research Council/Poetry Ireland postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin, researching a book on the lost street poets and tenement balladeers of the city. She was inaugural Poet in Residence at Poetry Ireland 2019-2022. Cullen is a recipient of the Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry and a prize-winning poet, children’s author and songwriter. She has published three poetry collections and four children’s books, including The Song of Brigid’s Cloak (Beehive 2022).

‘Smither’, an old English word for a small piece, was transformed by the Gaelic diminutive ‘íní’ into the Irish word for fragments, and reimported into Hiberno-English as ‘smithereens’. To Cullen, the word represents the fragmented nature of language in a postcolonial society. Smithereens/Smidiríní is a poem sequence based on Hiberno-English words, a fascination for Cullen, whose poem Plámás (Poetry Ireland Review 131) explored the origin of an Irish word for flattery in the French ‘blancmange’.