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“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
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