"The night sky of the far north is 'hardly darkened' on a stilled summer's evening while the storms are held out at sea. We are secure in the depths, holding our breath, hushed by the touch of pen on paper. These words are tinctures, the essence of landscape in drops of ink on a page, words that leave us lasting impressions of love in all its whispered secrets. Here you will find tenderness in the longing and the agelessness of love." Alison Lock, poet "Eileen Carney Hulme's new collection is a beautiful and atmospheric arrangement of subtle and bittersweet melodies. She captures the pathos and specificity of 'small lives sea-tinged' and 'beach huts / salt-crusted' with marvellous sensitivity and insight, yet she amplifies these details effortlessly into larger themes and questions. Carney Hulme's poems braid wistfulness and hope. They truly are 'charms against ragged skies'." Bren Booth-Jones, author of Blue Remembered Star "Distilled and deeply crafted as Eileen's poems are, I find in them a free-spiritedness and non -conformity which belies expectation based on what one might have read before. Characteristic also is a strong transpersonal element, a sense of larger forces at play, so that the intensely personal might be contextualised by the ambience of the natural world, the present moment by a sense of the passage of time." Mike Fox, author