by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Soaring meld of genres plumbs the lives of two Irish poets
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. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }