(From Introduction) The final poem, 'The Promise', in Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's collection, The Magdalene Sermon, begins, 'In retrospect, it is all edge', a theme and an image which appears often in Ni Chuilleanain's work. Her poems depict edges, borders, and crossings between different kinds of worlds: physical and metaphysical, life and death, past and present, human and natural, scientific and imaginative As Irene Gilsenan Nordin has suggested, Ni Chuilleanain's poetry 'is informed by the theme of crossing: the crossing from one realm of experience to another, from the realms of the everyday and ordinary to the realms of the spirit world and the world of the other'. (Patricia Boyle Haberstroh)