A Ghost in the Throat (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
This is a book about how women often become footnotes in their own stories. Because men have historically been the ones with the privilege of deciding what was important enough to keep record of, the domestic moments that make up women’s lives have often been disregarded and their voices often silenced.
Ní Ghríofa’s language is beautiful and I found myself captivated by her connection to a poet lost to time who I’d never heard of. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in literary or Irish history, those who are fascinated by the complexities of womanhood, and people who aren’t put off by descriptions of cadaver dissection.
— EmilyJune 2021 Indie Next List
“This is a literary mystery explored with white-hot intensity. The author’s journey, both physical and emotional, to discover more about the central poem and its author is obsessive and candid. It’s not just genre-blending, it’s genre-obliterating. A Ghost in the Throat cannot be contained.”
— Lesley Rains, City of Asylum Bookstore, Pittsburgh, PA
Description
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
When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. I am eleven, a dark-haired child given to staring out window ... Her voice makes it 1773, a fine day in May, and puts English soldiers crouching in ambush; I add ditch-water to drench their knees. Their muskets point towards a young man who is falling from his saddle in slow, slow motion. A woman hurries in and kneels over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a caoineadh, a keen to lament the dead.
In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain" during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, A Ghost in the Throat moves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.
About the Author
DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA is a bilingual writer whose books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Doireann's awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA, 2018), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen's University, 2018), the Ostana Prize (Italy, 2018), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2016), among others. She is a member of Aosdána and this is her prose debut.
