To Star the Dark by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

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