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    A Ghost in the Throat
    A Ghost in the Throat
    A Ghost in the Throat
    Ebook264 pages4 hours

    A Ghost in the Throat

    By Doireann Ní Ghríofa

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

    When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.

    On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own.

    Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiblioasis
    Release dateMay 27, 2021
    ISBN9781771964128

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    Reviews for A Ghost in the Throat

    4.5/5

    51 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT. So begins the stunning prose debut of Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa. The work is partly personal essay, partly autofiction, partly detective story, partly historical fiction, partly translation. It delves into the domestic life of the author—an always desire leading to childbearing to childrearing, to housekeeping. In this Ghríofa feels kinship with all women, one in particular, whose story spooled out some two hundred and thirty years prior, fellow Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

      Composed after the murder of her husband, Eibhlín Dubh’s Caoineadh Airt UíLaoghaire (The Keen of Art O’Leary) is a searing, visceral embodiment of grief and all its components—rage, the thirst for revenge, homage to the fallen and the fantasy of his resurrection. The work has been called the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century, but the traces of its author have largely disappeared, another case of what Ghríofa calls “female erasure.”

      In this book, the author sets out to rectify this. Mixed with the stories of Ghríofa’s life as a mother and lover are that of her sleuthing—searching in archives, haunting the paths where Eibhlín once trod. Interspersed with these are Ghríofa’s “imaginings,” the literary recreations of Eibhlín’s life spawned by the slim facts Ghríofa has unearthed. That these facts are mostly concerning Eibhlín’s male siblings and progeny renders Eibhlín a shade, known more through artistic inference than historical fact.

      As you’d expect from a poet, the beautiful language in a ghost in the throat is constantly seeking the possibility of rhythm and repetition. As in the Caoineadh itself, this language is muscular, the cadences drawing the life of the body. A woman’s body, Ghríofa’s and Eibhlín Dubh’s. And, by extension, every one of us who has experienced great loss.

      { More reviews at www.lucianchilds.com/blog }
    • 5/5
      This is a glorious blend of memoir, biography, poetry translation, and woman. As the author states, “This is a female text.” It’s also an Irish text, and I loved learning more of place and life; I’d never heard of the poem, and honestly I’m still thrilled every time knowing so much more is out there in the world to learn and gulp like the palmfuls of blood gulped by Eibhlin. I need to save these words as I felt them keenly and somewhat live by them in my reading: “I decide that I will return to these texts and commit an act of wilful 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.”
    • 5/5
      A terrifically compelling memoir/auto fiction/fiction (why are so many books these days so hard to classify?) about a young Irish mother who becomes obsessed about the life and of a noted Irish woman Eibhlin Dubh, whose young husband is killed and in response she composes what became known as an unforgettable Irish lament. During the course of the book the author, as information about Eibhlin is impossible to recover, emphasizes how women are left out of the historical record and often don't even garner a mention while unworthy men are highly noted. She is researching her topic as she gives birth to four children, pumps breast milk for needy women and takes care of her family, demonstrating how tough it is for women, both historically and today. "This is a female text. This is a female text. This is a female text." The author is a published poet so the prose is stunningly beautiful and heartfelt. I listened to an interview with her on the podcast Between the Covers where she read from the book and my mouth was hanging open. Beautiful.
    • 4/5
      This unusual book defies description...it could be memoir, history, or feminist prose. The publisher has classified it as creative nonfiction. The author, a poet, become obsessed by a female 18th century poet, whose classic poem of grief and mourning keeps coming up in the author's life. The obsession sets in as she goe about the daily tasks of caring for her small children, while she pumps breast milk to donate to babies in intensive care.The text begins, "This is a female text" and so it is. It explores how the lives of women are absent from the historical record, while the most mundane aspects of male lives are recorded. It explores the general benevolence of the lives of women who clean and care for others. The author's character of giving to others but this is not totally selfless as noted in the quote: "I am drunk on the golden whiskey of my own benevolence."In stolen moments she desperately searches for clues about the life of Eibhlín Dubh, the author of The Keen for Art O'Leary. The poem was written in Gaelic, each chapter is introduced with a phrase from the poem in Gaelic and in translation. The complete poem is included at the end of the book also in Gaelic and in translation.It is interesting that Eibhlín Dubh and names of her forbears and progeny are included throughout the text. But the author and her family remain nameless through the text.I give it 4 stars not only for the story, but for the beautiful prose within.
    • 5/5
      This is a halfway-through review.I am gob-smacked by this wonderful book. Doireann Ní Ghríofa looks at her own life as a mother of young children and a pregnant woman, the work of giving she does in the world, and her obsession with the woman behind the long poem most of us know as the Lament for Art O'Leary (the Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire / Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire) composed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in 18th c. Ireland.For those who don’t know the story, very very briefly, Eibhlín married, against her family’s wishes, a dashing military man from Nationalist ranks. He is murdered, she races to him where he is left to lie in the road, and in her grief composes the greatest known lament in Ireland.Doireann, herself a brilliant poet, seeks to discover the woman whose words reverberate so strongly today, to find the woman whose life, as so many other female lives, is erased from history.It is beautiful, compelling, sorrowful, filled with dignity and life.
    • 3/5
      This book shows the difficulty of transmitting one’s passionate obsession to others.It is a brave attempt by Doireann Ni Ghriofa to “translate”, to pass on her enthusiasm and obsessive interest in the story of an eighteenth century Irish noblewoman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonnail, and the poem which she composed about her husband and his death.It is also a memoir of Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s life as she pursued her obsession, whilst raising three young boys and the powerfully intense description of the traumatic birth of a daughter.Doireann Ni Ghriofa describes translation as:Such a methodical undertaking [which] requires a deliberation, a decelerated reading, and a kind of repetitive looping: back, and back, and back again. She also says: My attempt to know another woman has found its ending not in the satisfaction of neat discovery, but in the persistence of mystery. ... This is a female text.

    Book preview

    A Ghost in the Throat - Doireann Ní Ghríofa

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