A Ghost in the Throat

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. Eibhlìn Dubh Nì 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 Eibhlìn 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 Ni´ Ghri´ofa sets out to discover Eibhlìn 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.

Format/pages: paperback / 336 pages

ISBN: 9781771964111

Publisher: Biblioasis

Year: 2021