Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Or see the index
To Star the Dark is the first new collection of poems by Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, following her acclaimed prose bestseller A Ghost in the Throat
The poems in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s much-anticipated new collection To Star the Dark take place in hospitals, in cellars, in Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them.
Poems of blood and birdsong, of rain and desire, of aftermath and ambivalence, each spoken by a voice, which – like the starlings – sings, at once, both past and present.
DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA is a bilingual Irish poet and essayist, born in Galway in 1981, living in Cork for many years. She is author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity.
Ní Ghríofa’s first book in English, Clasp (Dedalus Press, 2015) won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Award. A Book of the Year in both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, Lies (Dedalus Press, 2018), draws on a decade of Ní Ghríofa’s Irish language poems, accompanied by her own translations.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is also author of the prose bestseller A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press, 2020) which finds the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective. Ní Ghríofa’s artistic practice encompasses cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing poetry with film, dance, music, and visual art, and her work has been commissioned by institutions such as The Poetry Society (Britain), Poetry Ireland, The Embassy of Ireland in Britain, and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Further awards for Ní Ghríofa’s work include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Ostana Prize (Italy), among others.
To Star the Dark (Poetry)
By Doireann Ní Ghríofa
70 pp.
2021
Dedalus Press
ISBN 9781910251874 (hardback)
ISBN 9781910251867 (paperback)
€20.00 hardback
€12.50 paperback
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive G-H, Archive G-H, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ghríofa, Doireann Ni
“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.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and was voted Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it has been described as “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original” (The Guardian) and a “masterpiece” (Sunday Business Post). Doireann is also 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), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others.
A Ghost in the Throat
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Author)
Publisher: Biblioasis
2021
Language: English
Paperbac : 336 pages
ISBN-10: 1771964111
ISBN-13: 978-1771964111
Paperback
$15.99
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: - Book News, Archive G-H, Archive G-H, Archive M-N, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ghríofa, Doireann Ni
Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature