THE SPACE BETWEEN RAIN

EILEEN CARNEY HULME

Publication Date June 1st 2010

Read Poetry Scotland's review of this book

Eileen Carney Hulme was born in Edinburgh and has lived and worked in many parts of the UK and in Europe. She is a registered Complementary Therapist and was a tutor of Aromatherapy for The Middlesex School of Complementary Therapies and for Hillingdon Adult Education in London.

Eileen has been writing poetry on and off for many years and her work has appeared in a number of small press poetry magazines, anthologies and poetry internet web-sites.

She has won several prizes and has been placed or Highly Commended in numerous competitions including The City Of Derby Short Story and Poetry Competition, Coffee House Poetry Competition, Hastings International Poetry Competition, The Sheila Nugent Awards, Partners Annual Poetry Competition, Indigo Dreams Press Poetry Awards, and The Dawntreader Poetry Awards. She has read her work at poetry festivals and in bookshops.

In 2004 Eileen was named as one of the top ten best poets in The Purple Patch Best Poets category as part of their small press awards.

In 2005 her first collection of poems Stroking The Air was published by Bluechrome of Bristol and the book was awarded third place in The Purple Patch Best Collections Award 2005.

She is a member of Elgin Writers and SAW (Scottish Association of Writers).

Eileen Carney Hulme draws inspiration from the big skies and deserted beaches in the beautiful far North of Scotland. Her poetry is the landscape of the heart and mixes spiritual and physical closeness through powerful images. She writes with a natural insight into the complex issues of love and loss, never mawkish or over sentimental but with refreshing clarity and honesty.

These are poems that celebrate life’s journey infused with a natural sense of movement and energy. They are living breathing poems that shift and shape through time, graceful and remarkably honest. The energy of the poems ebbs and flows to match mood and recurring themes of relationships, love and loss interweaved with the magic and mystery of places and the elements.

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Eileen Carney Hulme's quiet presence in poetry becomes more and more compelling. The poems in this new book The Space Between Rain sparkle throughout with a delicate philosophical light, and tackle their subjects head-on to wrest from them their weather and atmosphere. It's a book for re-reading, which more than fulfils the promise of Stroking The Air.
Sally Evans, Poetry Scotland

In The Space Between Rain Eileen Carney Hulme carves out a wealth of spaces – spaces for the reader to enter; spaces where small twists in events open up vistas to emotional and physical landscapes; spaces that hint at the strange and tease at the corners of perception. Beautifully understated, humane and lyrical, Carney Hulme’s second collection is a long-awaited delight. 
Dr Jan Fortune-Wood, Cinnamon Press

Eileen Carney Hulme weaves spells with her words. Her poems enchant with their delicately crafted imagery and sheer musicality. Hulme writes of morning souls and shamans, of hieroglyphs and fallen leaves; her territory is no less than that intimate space that defines us as being human.  
Nessa O’Mahony

The Space Between Rain

Four women sit at a rectangular
table, through bay-windows light
connects, spiders parachute in pairs and
the women smile knowingly
or not knowing, their words caught
in a web of consciousness

A man is polishing cutlery, perhaps
he is listening, he picks up empty
water jugs from abandoned tables-
this is his home and on vacant chairs
occasional ghosts linger-
sweet cachous of cloud-breath
loaned from the sky

A child dressed in summer, weaves
through shadowed winter drapes, drizzling
laughter on a worn carpet, she runs
to her father, her tiny feet trail a rainbow,
four women watch, whisper of
the space between rain

Breaking The Journey

‘And think not you can direct the course
of love, for love if it finds you worthy,
directs your course.’ Kahlil Gibran

Inside the Phoenix shop again
as though I’d never been away,
reading notices for healing,
oils, new age workshops,
the transformation game,
looking at dream-catchers,
crystals, necklaces and gems,
the sacred scent of incense
curling round my bones

I take a book of angels
from the shelf,
wonder if you held it
in your palms
on a day like this,
breathed the blue sea air
from your beach walk
imprinting your DNA forever

I know you have stood here
often, silent, meditative, clothed
and shaped in words; Krishnamurti,
Cayce and Gibran,
you offered me the gift of
the Prophet and I
accepted truth, oneness,
in the tumble of days,
of cobwebbed thoughts
and separate lives,
nothing will ever be the same.