Kummitus kurgus

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Krista Kaer (Translator), Indrek Õis (Translator)

„Itk Art O’Leary surma puhul” või „Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” on 18. sajandi iiri itk, poeem, mille lõi Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Iiri aadlidaam, kes abiellus oma pere tahte vastaselt ulja katoliiklasest aadlikuga. Mehe tapsid tema vaenlased varitsuses. Tühja sadulaga koju tulnud hobune viis Eibhlín Dubhi mehe surnukeha juurde ning legendi kohaselt jõi ta kamaluga mehe verd ja lõi sealsamas itku. Osa itkust ongi nii sündinud, teine osa on pärit surnuvalvest ja kolmas loodud pärast matuseid.„Kummitus kurgus” on Doireann Ní Ghríofa omaeluromaan selle itku sünnist, selle autorist, tookordsest Iirimaa elust ja ka Art O’Leary järeltulijatest. Ta on ise tunnustatud kakskeelne luuletaja ja põimib 18. sajandi elu ja sündmusi omaenda elus toimunud vapustavate seikade ja mõtetega naise ja ema rollist ning ühiskonna ootustest naisele. Eibhlín Dubhi saatus ei anna talle rahu ja talle tundub, nagu istuks kunagi elanud aadlinaise kummitus tal kurgus ja sunniks teda endast rääkima. Nagu ta ise ütleb, oli kohtumine selle poeemiga talle silmiavav, kuigi „kui me esimest korda kohtusime, olin mina laps ja tema oli mitu sajandit surnud”.„Kummitus kurgus” ilmus 2020. aastal ja on saanud ohtralt auhindu ja kiitust. Raamatus on ka poeemi „Itk Art O’Leary surma puhul” tekst, mille on tõlkinud Indrek Õis gaeli keelest.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoir, Ireland, Irish Literature, History, Audiobook

280 pages, Hardcover

First published April 16, 2020

About the author

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a ​bilingual ​writer​,​ devoted to exploring how the past makes itself felt within the present. ‘​​A Ghost in the Throat’ finds an 18th century poet haunting a young mother, leading her through visions of blood, milk, lust, and murder. Written on the roof of a multi-storey car park in Ireland, it went on to be described as “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original” (The Guardian), and a “masterpiece” (Sunday Business Post). ​'A Ghost in the Throat’ won the James Tait Black Prize and was voted overall Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, while the US edition was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. It is to appear in 15 further languages worldwide.
Doireann is also the author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), the James Tait Black Prize (Scotland), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature​, among others.

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit: Based on the larger number of likes I received for this review you either like to see me suffer or you share with the idea that literary fiction and award lists can be tiring and sometimes a bleak experience. I hope the latter.

Shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2021 and I won't mind if it wins.

Book 10/10.
I am done with reading (or attempting) the whole ROFC longlist and I will never do that again with any prize. From now on I will read only what I find interesting from an award list.

A young woman, mother of four children, tries to kid herself she is happy as SAHM and develops an obsession for a long dead poet. At least that's what I got from the book. It is part essay, part autofiction. I could really relate with parts of her story, not so much with others. It is an excellent book and it deserves to win prizes. It definitely deserves a better review but I am tired. It may be strange but I feel burnout from reading too much literary fiction lately so I am taking a short break. I need some cheering up and easy, fun books to make me smile or at least keep me turning those pages without looking at the percentage.

[Fionnuala]

Fragments. That's all the author of this book possessed when she began to research the life of an eighteenth century Irish woman poet whose Lament for her beloved husband had fascinated her since schooldays—and fragments are all she's left with at the end because many of the facts of the poet's life have been lost.

But like the broken china tea-cup she finds peeping out of the soil in the garden of the house the poet once lived in, the few fragments Doireann Ní Ghríofa tracks down are beautiful, and she knows how to make them speak, for she too is a poet.
And what's more, it's as if the pattern on the fragment of china matches the pattern of the fragments of her own life which she shares with us while recording her search into the life of the poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

When we think of a china tea-cup, don't we think of a teapot too, and maybe a table neatly set with many cups and saucers, and the table will be in a sunny room perhaps, and the room in a house that is clean because someone has been busy ensuring that it stays like that?

And never did I regret it,
for you set a parlour gleaming for me,
bedchambers brightened for me,
an oven warming for me,
plump loaves rising for me,
meats twisting on spits for me,
beef butchered for me,
and duck-down slumbers for me
until midday-milking, or beyond
if I'd want.*

House-keeping or home-making is an aspect of the pattern these two women share, though Eibhlín Dubh's husband provided servants while our contemporary poet Doireann, has to do all the housework herself, and she makes lists of household tasks which she must then stroke off when they are completed.

If each day is a cluttered page, then I spend my hours scrubbing its letters. In this, my work is a deletion of a presence.

But even while she is deleting one chore after another, Doireann is whispering a text to herself, a text based on the fragments of Eibhlín Dubh's life she is gathering.
And she finds that the fragments continually overlap with her own life.
Both women are wives to husbands they frankly lust for.
Both are mothers to small babies they feed with their own milk—echoes of bodily liquids abound in both their texts, and not just semen and breast milk but blood too.
Yes, blood, because Eibhlín Dubh's husband, Art O'Laoghaire was ambushed by his enemies, and died in a pool of his own blood on the fourth of May, 1773:

Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups, and oh, I gulped.**

And I gulped down this book because the patterns of its fragments fit my life more than I could ever have guessed.
When Doireann Ní Ghríofa writes, My childhood home stood on a steep hill, I nod in recognition.
When she speaks of lying in a hollow of the hill as a child, staring at the clouds, I'm there with her.
When she writes of her obsession with reading every available document even mildly related to the eighteenth-century poet's life, I remember the time I was similarly obsessed with the fragments of an eighteenth century artist's life while preparing a university thesis.
When Doireann watches beside a dying infant, I'm at her side.
When she says, Ten years have passed in which I have either been pregnant or breastfeeding or both, I feel she is speaking of me.
When she says of Eibhlín Dubh, I've become so accustomed to listening for echoes of her life in the life I know that she feels as real as any other unseen presence—as real as disembodied voices on the radio, as real as the human chorus of the Internet, as real as the dog who howls beyond our hedge, I nod, because, while reading this book, both Doireann and Eibhlín have become so real for me, they might be ghosts in my own throat.
When Doireann says, This is a female text, I know what she means with my body as well as my mind.
And I understand at a deep level how poems such as Eibhlín Dubh's Lament survived. Such poems belonged in the oral tradition, and were passed on via women's bodies through the generations, until someone finally wrote them down. Eibhlín's Lament was written down one hundred years after she composed it spontaneously at her husband's wake. And although it was a man who finally wrote it down, he got it from the lips of a woman.

*The translation of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire used in the book is by Doireann Ní Ghríofa herself.
Here's the Irish version of the house-keeping stanza, number 2 of 36:
Is domhsa nárbh aithreach:
chuiris parlús á ghealadh dhom,
rúmanna á mbreacadh dhom,
bácus á dheargadh dhom,
brící á gceapadh dhom,
rósta ar bhearaibh dhom,
mairt á leagadh dhom;
codladh i gclúmh lachan dhom
go dtíodh an t-eadartha
nó thairis dá dtaitneadh liom.

**Part of stanza 8 relating to Art O'Laoghaire's death:
do chuid fola leat 'na sraithibh;
is níor fhanas le hí ghlanadh
ach í ól suas lem basaibh

[Kai Spellmeier · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to explain why I love this book as much as I do. It's unlike anything I've read in my life. And I finished it and smiled, like the fool that I am. So this is just to say: I so love this book.

[Cinzia DuBois · Rating 2 out of 5]

I genuinely feel so awful for not liking this book because Doireann is clearly a very lovely and talented writer. I can sense she is such a sweet and genuine person while reading this book with so much talent and determination.

However, I’m afraid I found no drive or purpose to keep reading it as I didn’t connect with the narrative voice. I never felt connected or inspired, and I never knew why I should want to be on this journey, nor was I engaged in it.

It’s such a shame though, because my lack of enjoyment reading this book isn’t reflective of the writer’s passion, talent, intelligence or personality - it’s just purely my relationship with the tone in which it was written. I hate to be so frank, but the narrative bored me, and the connection with Dubh wasn’t enough to keep me wanting to read it. I admired her love for Dubh, but I didn’t know enough about the “why” behind it all to be invested in it.

Though I’m CLEARLY in the minority here, so don’t take my word for it. I’m so happy for Ní Ghríofa getting so much love and acclaim for her debut novel, and I hope she continues to write and bring so much joy to so many people.

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

’This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes.’
‘This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.’
‘This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.’
‘This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in.’

’When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.
Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming.’

Her teacher is the one who introduces her to this woman, who makes the story of this woman come alive, a woman who experienced the loss of a love in 1773. A woman who goes to his side, and kneeling over him, her voice ’rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable… a ‘caoineadh’, a keen to lament and honour the dead. Her voice generates an echo strong enough to reach a girl in the distance with dark hair and bitten nails. Me.’ The woman was Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill, one of the last noblewomen of the old ways, the old Irish order, and a poet.

Recalling these days in the past as a woman now with a husband and children, her days filled with the routines of motherhood, and all that it entails. The early years of marriage and motherhood float through her mind, the good and the bad. Run-down apartments they lived in with faucets that dropped nonstop, rats, a tiny yard, but also the nights when she would wake to nurse her first son, and then her second, watching the moon through the church spires. It was there she wrote a poem, and then another, and then a book. Love poems that spoke of the rain and of flowers.

’As he dreamt, I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.’

Knowing they need to move again, she’s driving in search of a new place when she sees a sign for Kilcrea, and searches her mind for the significance it seems to have in her memory. When she realizes it is where the poet buried her lover, memories come rushing back to her, sending her down a chain of memories that leave her wondering where the girl she’d been had gone.

This is how this begins, but there’s so much more to her story that is about love and sacrifice, marriage, children and family, re-discovering oneself, passion, life, and more.

It’s rare that I read and listen to a book simultaneously, but I’m so glad that I did with this one. Listening to this was so incredibly lovely, beautifully narrated by Siobhán McSweeney, but I was glad I had the book, as well, so I could highlight passages.

Hauntingly beautiful.

Published: 22 Aug 2020

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021

This was my first of the five books I ordered following the Republic of Consciousness longlist announcement (I had already read the other five).

It is an unusual book that defies categorisation - it won a prize for non-fiction last year, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize list is usually confined to fiction. The book straddles the grey area between the two - the parts about motherhood read as memoir, and the bare bones of the story of the Irish Gaelic poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, author of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, (The Keen for Art O’Leary) are true, but there is a degree of creative historical fiction about the way these are fleshed out.

The book is completed by the author's translation of the 18th century poem. I don't know enough Irish to comment on how accurate that is, but I did enjoy trying to pick out familiar words in the original Irish text which is printed alongside it. The later parts of the book also follow the author's attempts to trace Ní Chonaill's descendants.

I found it very impressive - a compulsive read, and as a male reviewer I am well aware that this "female text" is not targeted at me. Her account of her life as a mother of four, the last of which was born prematurely and came close to death, is very moving, as is the way she finds links between her own story and the story of the poet she is obsessed with.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a woman's text

... is a refrain throughout this book... but what does that mean? That the inset caoineadh or keen which is the subject of the narrator's interest and the text that she translates from Gaelic is composed by a woman? (I'm not sure we have evidence of that). Or that it is ventriloquising a woman's voice?** (a more likely and common position in literature before the nineteenth century). That it expresses the emotions of women across time who have lost a beloved husband for political reasons? That women have, conventionally, been written out of both history and, largely, from literary history and that this is an act of feminist recuperation? Or that the framing story which is written by a female author and told via a female narrator is 'a woman's text' - though, I'd say, it expresses one very traditional construction of femininity which is almost totally bound up in motherhood, a rather limiting position, surely, for 2020 when, finally, women are starting to speak out about not having a so-called 'maternal instinct' and embracing other options for being.

I love the lyrical voice of this book and the fresh imagery that is utilised but, to be honest, I'm really not enamoured of a book which revels in its domestic drudgery, elevating it to a service of love - it's fine that real life is made up of school runs and lunch boxes and putting the washing on and, for some, pumping breast milk, but it's, frankly, as boring to read about as it may be to perform.

More interesting is the research than the narrator and, presumably, author has done in reconstructing the purported composer of the keen, and the biographical aspects worked for me - again, though, stitching this story together with the everyday life of the narrator feels rather arbitrary as the only things they share are Irishness and a love for their husbands and family, and the bond created by the keen itself.

The translation of the keen which is included is done well - though I found myself rather resistant to the imagery of each stanza as a room (whatever the literal meaning in Italian) and never bought into the repeated trope that composing or translating a poem is a form of homemaking. This is supposed to bond the various parts of the book but as the link didn't stand up convincingly for me, the unity felt artificial and rather laboured.

I was surprised, too, that the narrator didn't pick up on the most striking image of the keen (unless I missed it?), where the widowed wife drinks her husband's blood - this is macabre and potent, is mentioned numerous times, but what is the significance in Irish culture?

So this is an uneven book for me: I loved the narrative voice and the gorgeous writing, and the literary history that feeds into the translation at the end; but the limited view of what a woman's life should comprise where 'woman' is used as a generic rather than individual signifier, is rather disappointing, and I was bored by the descriptions of domestic and maternal work.

** Women are the traditional mourners at funerals in many cultures and in literature think of the mourning for Hector at the end of The Iliad which ends with the funerary speeches of his wife Andromache, his mother Hecuba and, finally, Helen.

[Anne Bogel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewed in the February 2022 edition of Quick Lit on Modern Mrs Darcy:

"This is a female text." These beginning words are repeated, over and over, throughout. But what to say about this story, how to define it? Words fail me here, because it's so unlike anything I've ever read: part memoir, part meditation on the female creative process, part biography of a long-dead Irish poet, plus a translation of the poet's best-known work. If you're stirred by the offer of gaining a glimpse inside the mind of a modern poet grappling with her brilliant predecessors, read this immediately. This is going straight on my Best of the Year list. I listened to the exceptional audio version, narrated by Siobhán McSweeney

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for innovative fiction from small presses, and the Gordon Burn Prize for works that are "forward-thinking and fearless in both ambition and execution" and which cross genres. Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Biography. Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction, nominated for the Rathbones Folio Prize. And winner, at the An Post Irish Book Awards, of both the Odgers Berndtson Non-Fiction Book of the Year and the overall Book of the Year.

We are an echo that runs, skittering, through a train of rooms. — Czesław Miłosz

As a heart holds its chambers, as a poem holds its verses, so a house holds its rooms. — Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa is publised by Tramp Press, founded by Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff in 2014 to “find, nurture and publish exceptional literary talent”, a mission in which they’ve succeeded spectacularly with a number of award winning books including the Goldsmiths Prize and three times in the last five years winning the overall Book of the Year award at the An Post Irish Book Awards, most recently for this novel.

I say novel, and I think that is the right term, but the An Post Awards and Foyles both awarded A Ghost in the Throat their non-fiction book of the year 2020 and the James Tait Prize has treated it as biography, and that speaks to the form - a novel without fiction, a blend of essay and autofiction, as the author tells of her search for the woman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, behind an 18th century poem and lament, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.

She blends her historical investigations and imaginings with a very honest account of her own domestic life, particularly as a mother, and does it with a lyrical style, with "gorgeous prose" that is one of the Republic of Consciousness Prize’s criteria, and which highlights her literary base in poetry.

As the novel opens the narrator/author mixes reading, and translating from Gaelic to English, the poem with the precious daily act of breastfeeding - or rather pumping excess breast milk to be donated to premature babies (a selfless act that is to become particularly pertinent in her own life). The passage is also the one that gives the novel its title.

There are mornings, on finding myself particularly tired, that I might daydream a while, or make a ten- minute dent in a library book, but today, as on so many other days, I pick up my scruffy photocopy of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, inviting the voice of another woman to haunt my throat a while.

This is how I fill the only small silence in my day, by turning up the volume of her voice and combining it with the wheeze- whirr of my pump, until I hear nothing beyond it. In the margin, my pencil enters a dialogue with many previous versions of myself, a changeable record of thought in which each question mark asks about the life of the poet who composed the Caoineadh, but never questions my own. Minutes later, I startle back to find the pump brimming with pale, warm liquid.
...
I make myself a life in which whenever I let myself sit, it is to emit pale syllables of milk, while sipping my own dark sustenance from ink.

On 'rooms' - a key theme in the first half of the novel - and the relationship between her domestic work tidying the rooms of her house, and her act of translation of a poem already frequently translated:

In Italian, the word stanza means ‘room’. If there are times when I feel ill- equipped and daunted by the expertise of those who have walked these rooms before me, I reassure myself that I am simply homemaking, and this thought steadies me, because tending to a room is a form of labour I know that I can attempt as well as anyone.
...
I snap open my laptop, tip- tap the document in which Eibhlín Dubh’s words wait, and hurry through the door of a new stanza, measuring furniture and carpets, feeling the textures of fabrics between thumb and finger, and testing their weight. Then I set to replication. If I am to conjure her presence, I must first construct a suitable home for her, building and furnishing room after careful room, in which each mirror will catch her reflection.

On the erasure of women from history, and indeed the academic snobbery that suggests that since the poem was originally passed down orally, its quality and authorship may be in doubt:

This feeling glues itself to the introductory paragraph that often precedes the translations, flimsy sketches of Eibhlín Dubh’s life that are almost always some lazy variant of the same two facts: Wife of Art O’Leary. Aunt of Daniel O’Connell. How swiftly the academic gaze places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives.
…
After all, the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verb ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.

A passage of her imagining the birth of her heroine:

An ocean before sunrise churns vast and vivid with countless individual ripples, each in its own momentum. In the half- light beyond the beach, a farmyard grows hectic, with horses nuzzling oats, eggs finding fists, and milk tumbling from udders, hiss by hot hiss. Inside the house, a girl strides into the parlour and kneels to yesterday’s rubble- coals. Ash dances to her breath, and below, three embers begin to glow. From the kitchen, the smell of bread lifts, smooth white rolls speaking careful English for the family, brown loaves laughing in Irish for everyone else. Through each room lilts an excited murmuring, for today the woman of the house, Máire Ní Dhonnabháin Dhubh, is in labour.

And on her self-imposed limits on her historical re-imaginings, particularly of the relationship between the poet (nicknamed Nelly pre her marriage) and, the subject of her lament, her husband Art:

There are many moments in Nelly’s life that I won’t let myself sketch in the absence of evidence, because to do so would feel like trespass, or theft. Whenever I can’t bring myself to imagine the gap where a jigsaw piece should be, I look instead towards its periphery. Rather than imagining the intimacies of Nelly and Art’s courtship, I find myself thinking of the imperceptible beat in which a word exists, between the articulation and the hearing. I sketch the couple apart rather than together. First, the urge, the pulse, the need. Then the smile, the mischief, the little desire in its little flickering. Next, the paper, the quill’s pause, the hover, the liquid drop: blot, blot. The human effort to articulate a want and a love. The scratch of nib to paper, the liquid birth and loop of the letters, each connected to the next, word following word, and all the small spaces that exist between them. The paper sealed and sent on its way. The strange silence between a letter’s departure but before its delivery, the curious time after words have been imagined and imprinted on paper, but before they are read. The letter as a kinetic object of desire, in motion from one body to another. These spaces between Nelly and Art are all that I let myself see, how after a letter had left, one might linger at a window, imagining it held in the grip of a lover, and one’s own words moving quietly over another’s lips.

Ultimately the author is a little frustrated in her searches - she doesn’t succeed for example in finding, even approximately, how or when Eibhlín Dubh died. But she learns to treasure the gaps in the account and the mystery. That said there was, for me, a slight misstep around 2/3rd of the way through the novel, where she instead decides to trace some of the poet’s descendents, a section that becomes more conventional, and treads a too-well-trodden path of parish registers and newspaper archives.

But overall, a book that deserves the acclaim it has already garnered and a worthy inclusion on the prize longlist. 4.5 stars

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

2022 update - yet another prize listing with the shortlist for the US National Book Critics Circle Autobiography award

---------------------------------------------
Since my review now winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. These nominations again showing how this book is part biographical, part fiction - something recognised I think explicitly by its nomination for the Gordon Burn Prize which specifically looks for books which blend the two forms.

---------------------------------------------

“I think of [starling’s] song, how deftly they regurgitate strands of true remembered sound, weaving it into their own melodic bridges: a fusion of truth and invention; past and present”

I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize and shortlisting for the 2021 Folio Prize – although I was already familiar with it from its winning of the An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2020 – remarkably the third time in five years by its publisher Tramp Press who have (among others) published Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” (Goldsmith and Dublin Literary Award Winner) and a series of books by Sara Baume.

Tramp Press publish fiction, essays/non-fiction and a Forgotten Voices list which is “committed to rescuing and recovering forgotten literature, and to re-engaging with those writers”.

And interestingly this beautiful and heartfelt work stands at the intersection of all three of these areas – having already won prize nominations for both fiction and non-fiction due to its heavily auto-biographical/memoir/autofictional nature and being based around re-engaging with an older writer.

The author Doireann Ní Ghríofa is better known as a poet and her award winning collection “Clasp” examined the concept of palimpsest, of grief, of the joy and pain of motherhood – and featured in particular the poem “The Horse Under The Hearth” which is effectively a continuation of a famous 18th Century Irish keen (a lament) “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill – an elegy to Eibhlin’s soldier husband, murdered by an English Protestant Sheriff/magistrate over a dispute about a horse.

That poem was sparked from a love by the author not just of the poem itself but firstly a fascination with the writer as someone largely written out of history and known for her dead husband and her famous politician nephew (Daniel O’Connell) and secondly a strong sense of connection between her life and that of the poet.

This book – with its familiar refrain “THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT” is an exploration of a 21st Century auto-fictional narrator who reads and re-reads the poem, decides to translate it herself (the author’s translation with the original Gaelic is in the Appendix, and parts of the poem both accompany each chapter heading, give the book much of its narrative drive and appears frequently in the text.

This is also a book about motherhood and the giving and sacrifice involved – a U2 song (which the author hates but cannot dislodge) and its lyric of “you given yourself away” captures this idea and the narrator’s wider interest in sacrifice (the book starts for example with her pumping breast milk for premature babies – something which later takes on a much greater meaning for her; she continues to breast feed her daughter until almost forced to give up; she riffs on the Rapunzel Foundation – where girls grow their hair long before donating their ponytails to make wigs for those with hair loss).

The book is simply resplendent in repeated imagery.

There is, for example, the recurring themes of rooms – including how the narrator links it (via the Italian stanza) to the construction of a poem; on the concepts of desire; of how women in Irish history are in the “masculine shadow … only of interest as a satellite to male lives”

Starlings reappear – their ability to incorporate sounds into their song (as per my opening quote) conveying something of how the keen was first passed down verbally, of the author’s poem and of this novel.

There is discussion of how while male texts and the songs of bards were copied down to preserve them, “literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song”

Weaving and knitting feature – her first outing with her baby daughter to visit the site of the poem’s events we are told she is wearing a cardigan knitted by her grandmother “a female text in which every stitch is a syllable” and of course we immediately think of this book – a female text in which syllable is a stitch, a stitch in the historical picture the narrator is weaving. And later we are reminded that the etymology of “text” lies in the latin for “to weave” and how the famous poem “belongs to a literary genre worked an woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies”- a genre to which of course this book is proud to belong.

I could continue but will give only one more example. For me what really makes the 18th Century poem outstanding is the verse when the wife gallops to her husband’s still hemorrhaging dying body and unable to stem the blood, wipe or clean it “my palms turned cups, and oh I gulped”. And this terrible image of drinking blood – occurs twice in the narrator’s story at critical junctures. In hospital with her very premature daughter – and after a heel prick to draw blood and also to see if the baby will cry, she sucks the blood away from the heel. And at college, having studied hard and against school and family advice, to attend a medical/vet course at her first dissection she immediately cuts herself on a scalpel and retreats to suck the blood from the wound – the cutting incident starting the collapse of her original ambitions and a crucial turning point in her life.

The book has only one weakness – a lengthy chapter when, having exhausted the direct and secondary sources on Eibhlín and the site visits to understand more of her life, she decides to resort to relatively conventional genealogical tracings of her descendants. The failure itself (and the lack of interest in the chapter) I think does serve a purpose – it’s the only time when the text stops being a female text, as her quarry are entirely male and at the culmination of her searching she finds only a blank where her Eibhlín should be.

Overall this is a powerful and memorable book.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once every few years, a book will come along, take me gently by the hand and say “this is where you need to be”. A Ghost in the Throat is exactly that kind of book.

Doireann has achieved something wholly original here. Stitching together a number of genres, AGITT tells the stories of two women; Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and Doireann Ní Ghríofa herself. Tracing Eibhlín through her murky past, Doireann does so much more than map her life, she embraces it, mystery and all. At the same time Doireann writes of her own life with language that is so beautiful I found myself rereading sentences three or four times, memorising word after word.

It’s no wonder my copy of the book resembles that of something washed up on an abandoned shore, as I tore through the pages in both rain and wind, stumbling off and onto buses, ripping the pages edges in my desperation to get to the next page, the next sentence, the next word.

Poetic and honest, Doireann’s attempt at bringing the female voice to the front has more than succeeded. 5/5

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s mix of literary essay and autofiction focuses on an unnamed woman’s experiences of mothering. In snatches of time between feeds and school runs she reflects on the idea of a female text as much written on and through the body as one that’s reproduced as conventional, fixed composition. Time spent writing lists, doing household chores, looking after her children, including dealing with near-tragedy, all of these things accumulate to produce a rich but ultimately ephemeral story of a woman’s life, it’s a narrative that might be encountered in many forms like a gift of knitted baby clothes symbolising female craft and affection. Alongside this contemporary catalogue of days are the woman’s reflections on another piece, a classic, 18th-century Irish poem riven with the traces of desire, grief and longing, produced in the distant past yet somehow speaking to her across the years. The poem’s a caioineadh, a traditional lament for the dead, noblewoman Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill’s outpouring for her murdered lover. The poem (included here) and the poet represent something that falls between haunting, obsession and talisman as the woman painstakingly traces its origins and its author’s lost history.

I loved the ideas behind this and was often fascinated by the detailing of the central character’s thoughts and feelings. There are numerous passages packed with exquisite, sometimes startling images, although others are also slightly overblown; yet I found, as the book unfolded, the associations being made between past and present increasingly tenuous and unconvincing. And I was less caught up in the recreation of Ni Chonaill’s life as I was with the experiences of the present-day character, so their juxtaposition was less effective for me than it might have been. Still it’s a unique take on literary heritage and women’s creativity, and one I might return to at another time.

[emma]

you've heard of judging a book by its cover, now get ready for: judging a book by its title

[Claude's Bookzone · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a powerful and empowering female text. I found some parts more compelling than others but overall I loved the writing and the search for the information about Irish poet, Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill. To me these excerpts (as best as I could hear as I listened to the audiobook) capture the elements and sections of this book that I enjoyed the most:

When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.
Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming.

Such furies burn and dissipate and burn again for this is a poem fuelled by the twin fires of anger and desire.

She is in pain. As it the poem itself. The text is a text in pain. It aches.

As he dreamt, I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.

My document doesn't hold her voice, and as such, I judge it a failure. An inevitable failure but a failure none the less. I try to accept this fact while showing myself compassion. I've gained so much from my work. For one thing I've learned is the element I cherish most in Eibhlin Dubh's work does not lie in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over it. No, my favourite element hovers beyond the text. In the untranslatable pale space between stanzas where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs. Still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried on to breathe elsewhere.

I wonder what I might learn of Eibhlin Dubh's days were I to veer away from the scholarship I have simply accepted thus far. I think again of those blunt brief sketches of Aunt and Wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women that knew her instead?

Definitely worth reading to explore some of the ideals of motherhood and the power of the 'female text'.

[Breda Murphy · Rating 2 out of 5]

God I feel like the only person in the world who didnt really get it. The writing is good and the premise is interesting but the constant comparison between Eibhlín and Doireann's life just didn't really work for me. A book about the poem would have been great and a separate book about Doireann might have been ok but the two together felt like trying to mix oil and water.
People are calling it a masterpiece and I'm just really disappointed that I do not get it. I found the book a slog and it was an effort to pick it up and continue reading.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reading Fionnuala’s beautiful review of this work, I knew I had to read the book—and soon. I’m drawn to stories of obsessive types pursuing every little detail of their subject, especially those of women who have been put in corners.

After reading Fionnuala’s review, my mind went to Ana Historic, which is a novel (this isn’t) that has an autobiographical feel and deals with the narrator’s obsession over pursuing the story of a woman who’s a mere phrase in a historic archive. Ana Historic was recommended to me by a poet acquaintance and it’s written almost as a prose poem; this work is written with poetic turns of phrase and insight, and it’s about a poet, written by a poet.

As I started the book though, my mind went to a more prosaic work, Searching for Tamsen Donner. It’s nonfiction and memoir, as is A Ghost in the Throat. Both are not just about the obsessive physical and mental journeys for details about a woman from the past, but just as much about motherhood in the present.

With the sentence At forty-eight years old, she is reduced to a pet-name, a quick scratch of a quill within a male text, I thought of Frances Trollope, who was called Fanny by a belittling press. She was a well-known writer in her own time, but is now mostly referred to as the mother of Anthony. This book’s subject, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, is mostly known as “Wife of Art O’Leary, Aunt of Daniel O’Connell.”

While reading this book, I thought of a good friend who researches and writes about a woman she is obsessed with. My friend has a published work on her subject, its title linked to a famous man, and she hasn’t stopped digging in the archives and writing of this woman. To a much lesser extent, I thought of myself, researching and writing of a notorious uncle because I was bothered that in newspapers and online accounts one of the women in his story is merely a name and a role.

The imagery of rooms runs through this narrative: once full rooms, now empty of the objects females have used; “hidden rooms”; rooms within rooms, even if that room is a cupboard holding another female object, Ní Ghríofa’s breast pump.

Obsessive researchers and writers explore the hidden corners of these rooms and bring forth from the shadows what would be lost otherwise and to our detriment, missing as we would the feel of these stories in the chambers of our hearts.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes writing has a kind of talismanic force drawing us into the past so that we feel enlivened and profoundly connected to the sensibility found in the text. “A Ghost in the Throat” is a book dedicated to such an experience. It's part memoir, part exercise in fiction and part process of translation. Doireann Ni Ghriofa meditates upon the life and writing of Eibhlin Dubh, an 18th century poet and member of the Irish gentry. After her husband's murder, Dubh composed the ‘Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire' which is a long poem or dirge that is a visceral cry for this agonising loss which still feels painfully real centuries later. Ghriofa connects to this voice and it fills her imagination as she goes about her days caring for her children. She sets out to translate the poem from the Gaelic into English but is also drawn into researching and recreating what can be traced of Eibhlin Dubh's life since little is known about what happened to her following her husband Art's murder except through the recorded history of her children and their progeny. The caoineadh wasn't originally written down but orally passed along over time until it was eventually set to paper so the text is also imbued with the lives of all who've spoken it. Ghriofa meaningfully describes how this makes it a uniquely “female text” and how the state of motherhood physically connects her to a wider sense of women's history. It's extremely moving how Ghriofa describes the way Dubh becomes such a strong presence in her life and how that connection is transformative.

Read my full review of A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa on LonesomeReader

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

There once was a woman who fell in love with a poem.

So begins a mini essay written for the Irish Times by the author Doireann Ní Ghríofa describing her almost life-long obsession with the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, (The Keen for Art O’Leary), an epic Gaelic lament, published in 1773 by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, upon learning of the brutal murder of her much desired husband, whose unborn child she carried.

In A Ghost In My Throat, she puts aside the documents and transcripts and in compelling, often poetic, multi-layered prose, talks us through the journey this poem has taken her on and carried her through, as she imagines but rarely fabricates the life of Eibhlín Dubh (whose full name translates to Evelyn Dark O’Connell).

It is beautifully coherent and audacious, a feat normally given to scholars occupying dusty rooms in closed towers, firstly that the Caoineadh made it into print and endures, despite being the work of a woman; most who lived in the 1700’s, the 1800’s and even the early 1900’s have long since slipped into silence and out of print and secondly that Doireann Ní Ghríofa managed to pursue her research passion while pregnancy, motherhood and house-wifery claimed most of her hours.

Our Purpose Finds Us, Silencing the Naysayer(s)

More than a passion, the poem provided solace, company, offering mystery and a promise, one whose secrets would only be revealed if she trusted the process and closed her ears to the reverberating comment of the visiting public health nurse, who’d snooped through her folders while she was making tea.

‘Art O’Leary! Probably as close as we got to boy-bands, in my day.’ I try to mask my grimace.
‘Taking a night course, are we?’ I shake my head.
‘So what’s all this for then?’ My shoulders answer on my behalf, my whole body prickling crimson. She soon turns to scolding me about the baby instead: no feeding schedule, no set sleep routine, one would imagine with a fourth child a mother would be a little more, well…she lifts her brows and palms.

Though her words provoke tears, self-pity, anger and rage, they result in a resolute clarification of her purpose.

In my anger, I begin to sense some project that might answer the nurse’s query. Perhaps I’d always known what it was all for. Perhaps I’d stumbled upon my true work. Perhaps the years I’d spent sifting the scattered pieces of this jigsaw were not in vain; perhaps they were a preparation. Perhaps I could honour Eibhlín Dubh’s life by building a truer image of her days, gathering every fact we hold to create a kaleidoscope, a spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid. Once this thought comes to me, my heart grows quick. I could donate my days to finding hers, I tell myself, I could do that, and I will.

A Female Text

This is something Doireann Ní Ghríofa has thought long about, years in fact. This poem and the absence of women in texts. The absence of women’s words. The difficulty in accessing the voice, the thoughts, the words, the life of women. Valuing their contribution, raising the importance of their passions and intellectual pursuits, that might valiantly sit alongside the domestic pursuits of raising children and keeping a home.

She is all those things, sharing them, giving them equal value and space on the page. A breastfeeding mother, a lover, a housewife, a poet, a reader, a writer, a medical student, a seer.

This is a female text, composed by folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores.

This is a female text, born of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of nursery rhymes.

Commemoration in a Poem

Her research tells us that in the old Gaelic order poems were traditionally commissioned by taoisigh – who employed a (male) bard to commemorate an occasion or person in verse, whereas that attributed to women resides in their bodies, in song, in an oral or embroidered tradition. Some say this poem can not be considered a work of single authorship, referring to it as a collage, or folky reworking of older keens. This has our author looking up the Latin for text, to find it rooted in the word ‘texere‘ : to weave, to fuse, to braid.

the Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.

Reading all she can find in libraries and online, in academic sources or otherwise, relating to her ghostly poet, Doireann Ní Ghríofa sees between and around the lines of texts, scanning for clues. An 1892 publication: The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade: Count O’Connell and Old Irish Life at Home and Abroad, 1745-1833 details a stash of family letters belonging to Eibhlín Dubh’s brother Maurice, from which she is able to:

commit a wilful act of erasure, whittling each document and letter until only the lives of women remain. In performing this oblique reading, I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.

There is so much in this book that I admire, that I connect to and could mention, but as I see the word count pass 1,000 words, I know I must stop and let you discover it for yourself. Within the first 50 pages I was hooked, highlighting lines, noting synchronicity’s, reliving heartbreaking experiences, recognising an obsessive desire to follow threads, reading, learning, writing while nurturing, mothering & creating. What a find this was!

Having finished it, I can say I absolutely loved it, it is one of my most scribbled in books, reading it over a weekend, I had to force myself to pause to make it last, a hot contender for my ‘Outstanding Read of 2020’ and a brilliant example of a poet with narrative storytelling ability turning to prose. Sad to be finished but happy with the promise the author makes in the last lines.

Highly Recommended

[Lotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5. I really liked this, but didn't love it quite as much as I hoped I would unfortunately. The memoir portion of this was EXCELLENT, 10/10, amazing, but I didn't care that much about the research the author does on the poet living in the 1700s. Doireann Ní Ghríofa didn't really manage to convey exactly why she was so obsessed with Eibhlín Dubh (at least I didn't fully get it) and even though I did think the parallels between the two were interesting, I just didn't find that aspect of the book particularly interesting. However, I do think this is very much worth reading for the memoir aspect alone.

[Aoife · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a female text

I honestly don't think I have the right type of critical, analysing mind to talk about this book properly in the way it deserves but all I can say is, it's a masterpiece.

In this book Doireann Ní Ghríofa outlines her own life and identity as a young mother who becomes enthralled with the mystery of Eibhlín Dubh - the author of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Who she was before she became the wife and widow of Art, and what became of her after his death. She disappears from history as the letters she once wrote, or on which her name appeared, were thrown away while similar notes connected to male figures attached to her lived on throughout history.

Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped."

There is so much to love about this story - both Doireann's intense attachment and growing obsession with Eibhlín, and the way she uses her story to tell her own from failed medical student to passionate teacher and onward to loving mother who not only uses her own body to nurture the children of her flesh, but to nurture other babies in need of mother's milk.

"In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself."

I thought the structure and flow of this story was perfect. I felt equally attached whether Doireann was talking about her hospital stay, Eibhlín's early life with her twin Mary or the years after when Doireann and her family finally moved to a permanent home and Doireann attempted to pay homage to the woman who came before her and spilled her love into the house and garden (I really loved this chapter about remembering the lady who once lived in their new home, it was so lovely and if everyone could remember others/perfect strangers in the same way, what special moments they would be).

In this book, Doireann paints a picture of Eibhlín Dubh and brings her to life in a glorious way. In writing what she knows down, she finally gives to Eibhlín her own caoineadh that she rightly deserves. Forgotten in history behind the shadows of sons, husbands and brothers, a young mother finally uses her own power of language to pull Eibhlín back into the light and take her rightful place in Ireland's memories.

"In every page there are undrawn women, each waiting in her own particular silence."

This book just really hit me where it was meant to, and I loved every bit of it. I'm excited to reread it again in the future and I feel like every time I do I will feel different emotions and react to different parts even more strongly than I already did the first time around.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1773, an Irish noblewoman called Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill found the body of her husband after he was murdered and in the fury of her pain, she kneeled down to drink his blood.

She went on to compose a “caoineadh,” an elegy or keen, to her beloved dead husband that became one of the most celebrated poems in Irish literature.

“A Ghost in the Throat” is an ode to obsession.

How Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s obsession with a dead poet’s life propels her, how it sustains her, how it fires her imagination and creative powers, how it feeds her sense of empathy, how it becomes an adventure story and the key to finding the way back to herself through the maze of everyday life with four children under the age of six.

“A Ghost in the Throat” is a galvanizing war cry against erasure.

The illusory erasure of Doireann’s to-do lists. The erasure of herself in chores and other people’s needs. The erasure of the Irish language by the British colonizer. The erasure of women’s lives in histories written by men.

“A Ghost in the Throat” is a love letter to Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose incantatory words were carried out loud through centuries, propelled by female kinship and desire. A love letter to female texts, female bodies and female voices, which are all really one and the same.

“A Ghost in the Throat” is an invitation. An invitation to accompany the writer on her maddening quest. To join in. To be present in each scene. To “feel” as an integral, living part of a book being written before our eyes.

An invitation to get quiet, very quiet, and listen to the voices of the past as they beat furiously like a heart in the midst of our days. As they flutter like ghosts in all of our throats.

One of my absolute favorite books this year.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know enough about Doireann Ní Ghríofa to know whether a large part of this book is autobiography or auto fiction. Either way, our narrator is a woman who is both a mother and a poet. She tells us how she became obsessed with the 18th century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, author of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire which has sometimes been described as the greatest poem written in Ireland or Britain during that century. As she wears herself out balancing motherhood and her obsession, she comes to realise something about Eibhlín Dubh:

"How swiftly the academic gaze places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives."

And she wonders:

"I think again of all those blunt, brief sketches presenting this woman in the thin roles of aunt and wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women she knew instead?"

And she decides:

"I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink."

And so she searches the available documents, removing the men and looking for the woman hidden in the shadows. Part of this book becomes the re-told story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and, as our narrator says:

"I recognise how deeply different Eibhlín Dubh’s life is from mine, and yet, I can’t help myself in drawing connections between us."

And so a large part of this book consists of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s story and her writing of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Caoineadh means "keen" and a keen is a lament for the dead. Ní Ghríofa begins her book by telling us "this is a female text" and a keen was a female lament at a time when women had a very much inferior standing in society, so much so that caoineadhs were not considered worthy of being written down (writing being for men) and were passed through generations of women orally. This leads to another of the key topics in the book which is inheritance through the female line.

I found the first half of this book completely absorbing. It is here that Ní Ghríofa chases Ní Chonaill through history whilst, in parallel, recounting her own life experiences. As she says, she finds connections between the two of them. The U2 song "With or without you" echoes through the book with its refrain of "you give yourself away", but it also seems that for Ní Ghríofa, she can’t live with or without Ní Chonaill.

In the second half, I found that the book lost a bit of impetus. Here, Ní Ghríofa chases after other members of Ní Chonaill’s family including several of the men and whilst the writing remains poetic and impassioned, I found the book lost a bit of its focus.

I hope that in discussion of this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize we can talk about the repeating references to rooms. For example:

"The task of translation itself, however, does not feel unfamiliar to me, not only due to translating my own poems, but because the process feels so close to homemaking. In Italian, the word stanza means ‘room’. If there are times when I feel ill-equipped and daunted by the expertise of those who have walked these rooms before me, I reassure myself that I am simply homemaking, and this thought steadies me, because tending to a room is a form of labour I know that I can attempt as well as anyone."

Again and again the author returns to rooms. Even a grave becomes a room at one point. This feels like something that should be discussed further.

This is a powerful book written in powerful, poetic prose.

(This article is a helpful one either before or after reading the book: https://stingingfly.org/review/a-ghos...)

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 4 out of 5]

If not for the unmistakable recommendation by a GR/FB- friend and avid reader, I would not have given this a chance, let alone making it jump to the top of my astronomical To Read-pile. The combination of a slightly gothic, slightly historical, a bit esoteric and abundantly poetic mixture doesn't immediately trigger my reading appetite. But I did love the book in the end and am glad I have read it. I admire the huge effort she's put in the language and in making a statement in praise of women and motherhood.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars
I found this in the horror and supernatural section of my local bookshop, probably because of the following quote on the back:
“When we first met, I was a child and she had been dead for centuries.”
It is not that sort of ghost story, it’s about the author’s relationship to an eighteenth century lament for the dead, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill a woman mourning her husband. The story goes that Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was married with a young child and one on the way when her husband was murdered (he was Catholic, his murderers were Protestant and part of the establishment). She rushed to the scene and found him bleeding out, in her grief she drank his blood and composed the lament. Ní Ghríofa becomes obsessed with the poem and its author, about whom little is known. It is not known when she died or where she is buried. She was a relative of Daniel O’Connell. Ní Ghríofa researches her life and the poem and ends the book with her own translation of the poem (It wasn’t written in English).
This is how the book begins:
“This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores.
This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes.
This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.
This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.
This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in.”
The research and writing was done over a period of years when Ní Ghríofa was pregnant or breastfeeding or both. There is a good deal about both in the book, combined with some good prose (Ní Ghríofa is a poet) and some impressive scholarship, published by Tramp Press. The book weaves together Ní Ghríofa’s own life, her research and the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.
There is an elevation of a little known female poet and her striking poem, which is combined with a celebration of domesticity and motherhood. As well as being biography, memoir, auto fiction and history it can’t be separated from the interior life and personality of the author. There is a good deal of speculative imagination about what might have been:
“I try to imagine the small treasures of her days, all she saw and took joy in: watching her sons begin to run, to ride, to read, their faces lit with Art’s old smile. The flight of bats and swallows. The branches reaching higher each year, their leaves turning gold, falling, and then budding green again.
All the remembered fragments of her dreams, all her frustrations, her money worries, her lists, her days of egg-pains and brass-polishing … her days of brave faces and darning … her days of loneliness, her days of laundry. Her children, waving back at her from the garden … always waving as they leave.”

This is an original and unusual book, it can feel claustrophobic at times, but the subject and the way it is approached make it worthwhile

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We may imagine that we can imagine the past, but that is an impossibility. As a child I was so enchanted by history that I would sometimes sit by a stream and try to daydream myself back in time."

This was an excellent book for some and I can readily see why, but I am not this type of an excellent a reader and felt so often that I was falling short of the writer. I did have the audio and the print and used both but resorted to the audio to enjoy the cadence of the language and the pronouncement of the old Gaelic verses and entire poem the author so often refers to (the audio is excellent for this. Just listening to the language spoken is worth a listen).

The story is non-fiction memoir told by the writer who is an Irish poet. She tells of going through her days of being pregnant and a mother, nursing her children, taking them to school and just exploring her days. During these days she becomes obsessed with an historical Irish poet and the legendary lament written to her dead husband. This poem and the poet, about little as known seems to take over her life or any hours she can spare.

What I loved was the language and the glimpses of history woven in the text. The writing is beautiful and I found I did find more in it using the print but liked the sound of the audio for many of her ramblings as I did get bored during long spells.
It is not a long book, but seemed longer and it is not one to rush through. Yet I'm not sure even now what I was suppose to find in these pages.

At one point the author states, "What will it take to make me let go?"
Boy Howdy, I had been asking her this question for the last half of the book. Her obsession with finding our more about the author--Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill--of this historical poem meets so many obstacles that I had to wonder why she kept on. Like a mystery I was hoping for some big resolution in the end. It never really materialized.

This not a plot driven book so I think my looking for insights and a story got in the way of what the book was saying. It is a wonderful book but just not for me. If you love literary nuance it maybe for you. I hesitated to write this review as I don't want to steer anyone away from it but I found it a read I will think about but largely did not enjoy reading. 3 Stars.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't form any good review on this but it had parts of it that I liked. Re audiobook was good and it worked well with the lyrical, "talking to a friend" kind of feel the book has. But on other notes it wasn't enough for 4 stars for me

[Jola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Laurie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ik geef zelden 1 ster, maar dit was niet te harden. Ik ben er dan ook een maand of wat mee bezig geweest.

Stilistisch een draak. "Het zou doodstil zijn geweest in de koude molen, als haar stem niet had geklonken" en dat soort ongein. Ontzettend veel herhaling van gekunstelde frases (haar lichaam brulde open met een kind) met een overmaat aan synesthesie.

Ook inhoudelijk maakte dit boek voor mij de beloftes op de achterflap niet waar. Ik ben een groot fan van het "obsessieve vrouw"-thema, en ik keek echt uit naar deze roman, die klinkt als een spannend literair experiment rondom de parallellen tussen vrouwenlevens. Het voelt voor mij echter alsof de auteur twee dingen probeert en in geen van beide echt slaagt. Enerzijds vind ik het een matige roman over een schrijfster die de pagina's vult met ontelbare scènes over borstvoeding en weinig originele overpeinzingen, anderzijds een vrij saai werkstuk over een historisch figuur, dat krampachtig probeert de lezer betrokken te houden met literaire kunstjes.

Daarnaast ben ik op persoonlijk en politiek vlak geen fan van de feministische stroming waarin "het vrouwelijke" wordt ingekaderd op een manier die borderline genderdeterminisme uitdraagt. Het bestempelen van allerlei (lichamelijke) activiteiten als zogen, baren, borduren en zelfopoffering als 'vrouwelijk' vind ik in de meeste gevallen ergerlijk en (cis-)seksistisch. Desalniettemin slagen sommige schrijvers, historici en essayisten er fantastisch in om de kracht en de feministische waarde van dit soort, al dan niet gemarginaliseerde, activiteiten uit te lichten. Bij Ní Ghríofa gebeurt volgens mij eerder het tegenovergestelde: het gedrag van haar hoofdpersonage en de vermoeiende, vaker geziene kritische noten op het wegschrijven van vrouwelijke geschiedenis plaatsen 'vrouwelijkheid' in een kader van submissiviteit en sleur, zonder het emancipatoire element van dit soort marges ooit echt uit te diepen.

[Sean Meagher · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of my most disappointing reads in recent memory. Take a quick glimpse of book description on this page. Sounds intriguing doesn’t it? The reality is much different. Though it starts out promisingly enough, this book quickly becomes a repetitive mess. Though the author states from the the beginning “this is a female text,” I thought this meant it was a story of a woman by a woman. What it actually is is a story about this woman’s breasts. Pages and pages of descriptions of the process of feeding her children or of pumping her milk. Endless descriptions about her nipples, the size of her breasts, and most of all MILK MILK MILK. Literally over half of this book is the author talking about her milk, describing her milk, envisioning fantasies of houses literally bursting apart in a flood of her milk. There are small asides about her personal life, as well as the supposed obsession with a centuries old
poem and poet that are the supposed plot of this book. I found the first few stories about a tired mother giving her body to her children to be very beautiful and poignant and thought I saw where the novel was headed. However, I wish someone, somewhere, maybe one of the many reviewers here had bothered to mention the astronomical percentage of this book that is just descriptions of the authors breast and nipples. Every few paragraphs another aside about breast milk. MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILK. I wanted the story of the mother connecting to a woman from hundreds of years in the past through a poem. There was little of that. Also, there was a nauseating description of her husband’s vasectomy. And milk. Milk milk milk

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This is a female text.” In an elegant loop, Ní Ghríofa begins and ends with this line, and uses it as a refrain throughout. What is the text? It is this book, yes, as well as the 18th-century Irish-language poem that becomes an obsession for the author/narrator, “The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire” by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill; however, it is also the female body, its milk and blood just as significant for storytelling as any ink.

Because the protagonist’s name is the same as the author’s, I took her experiences at face value. As the narrative opens in 2012, Ní Ghríofa and her husband have three young sons and life for her is a list of repetitive household tasks that must be completed each day. She donates pumped breast milk for premature babies as a karmic contribution to the universe: something she can control when so much around her she feels she can’t, like frequent evictions and another pregnancy. Reading Eibhlín Dubh’s lament for her murdered husband, contemplating a new translation of it, and recreating her life from paltry archival fragments: these tasks broaden her life and give an intellectual component to complement the bodily one.

My weeks are decanted between the twin forces of milk and text, weeks that soon pour into months, and then into years. I make myself a life in which whenever I let myself sit, it is to emit pale syllables of milk, while sipping my own dark sustenance from ink. […] I skitter through chaotic mornings of laundry and lunchboxes and immunisations, always anticipating my next session at the breast-pump, because this is as close as I get to a rest. To sit and read while bound to my insatiable machine is to leave my lists behind and stroll instead through doors opened by Eibhlín Dubh.

Ní Ghríofa remembers other times in her life in an impressionistic stream: starting a premed course at university, bad behaviour that culminated in suicidal ideation, a near-collision on a highway, her daughter’s birth by emergency C-section, finally buying a house and making it a home by adopting a stray kitten and planting a bee-friendly garden. You can tell from the precision of her words that Ní Ghríofa started off as a poet, and I loved how she writes about her own life. I had little interest in Eibhlín Dubh’s story, but maybe it’s enough for her to be an example of women “cast once more in the periphery of men’s lives.” It’s a book about women’s labour – physical and emotional – and the traces of it that remain. I recommend it alongside I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell and Mother Ship by Francesca Segal.

(Read as part of the Rathbones Folio Prize shortlist.)

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.