A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa review – incandescent treasures

In this dazzling prose debut, the poet presents a reimagining of 18th-century life entwined with her own existence

The 18th-century Irish poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire is a “keen” written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, a woman mourning her husband and raging at his murder. Doireann Ní Ghríofa first encountered it as a schoolgirl with a gift for daydreaming. By the time she found her way back to it, she was married and midway through a decade during which she was either pregnant, breastfeeding or both, her days filled with the “drudge work” of raising four small children. In snatched moments of solitude – invariably accompanied by a whirring breast pump – she would study her tatty photocopy of the poem, “inviting the voice of another woman to haunt my throat a while”.

This incandescent, uncategorisable prose debut is the result of her invocation. It’s a book that is many things – a reimagining of an 18th-century life that combines scholarship with imaginative verve; an account of obsession and a meditation on the limits of biography; a memoir of post-feminist motherhood. It also features Ní Ghríofa’s own stirring translation of Eibhlín Dubh’s lament.