Weather Report: On Beauty

Post #17 "A Ghost in the Throat" by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

On the back of the dust jacket of my precious first edition copy¹ of A Ghost in the Throat are these lines:

I want you to 
know that she was 
a female being.

I want you to 
know that she was 
a female, being.

I want you to 
know that she was. 

After I had first read A Ghost in the Throat in 2020 I did something I hadn’t ever done before, I sent a letter and card of appreciation to the author, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, through her publisher Tramp Press. A total fangirl action. Why was I so excited and moved by this book? Was it because of the beauty of the language, the skillful weaving together of female lives, or because I’ve been trying for a long time to write about one of my own foremothers, one of those ‘shadow-women’ as Ní Ghríofa phrases it when she considers the lavish life described by Eibhlín Dubh in her lament for her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. I’d say it’s all three but reading this book inspired me, gave me fresh energy for my own work-in-progress, as its beauty and skill simultaneously terrified me.²

I envied her her home and wondered how many servants it took to keep it all going, how many shadow-women doing their shadow-work, the kind of shadow-women I come from. (Ní Ghríofa, p. 17)

Ní Ghríofa is first and foremost a poet and this shines through the language used in this account of the life of the 18th century Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, woven through with the quotidian tasks and challenges of Ní Ghríofa’s life as a young mother.

This is a female text, witten in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little. (Ní Ghríofa, p. 4)

As readers we are allowed intimate access to the multiple and varied strands of the life of a woman, a mother, a writer, who is reaching back through the centuries to uncover, to re-imagine, the life of another woman, a mother, one whose lament, this heart-breaking love song, is transformed by Ní Ghríofa into the key to her life.

In the school car park, I found myself a little early to pick up my eldest and sought shelter from the rain under a tree. My son was still dreaming under his plastic buggy-cover, and I couldn’t help but admire his ruby cheeks and the plump, dimpled arms I tucked back under his blanket. There. In the scrubby grass that bordered the concrete, bumblebees were browsing - if I had a garden of my own, I thought, I’d fill it with low forests of clover and all the ugly weeds they adore, I’d throw myself to my knees in service to bees… I rummaged for my phone. There were more verses to the Caoineadh than I recalled, thirty, or more. The poem’s landscape came to life as I read, it was alive all around me, alive and fizzing with rain, and I felt myself alive in it. Under that drenched tree, I found her sons… I was startled to find Eibhlín Dubh pregnant again with her third child, just as I was. (Ní Ghríofa, pp. 16, 17)

We witness the exhausted new-mother state of Ní Ghríofa, the ‘whirligig’ of demands, the lack of sleep, the ‘whip exhaustion of night-feeds again’. “I was ruled by milk now, an ocean that surged and ripped to the laws of its own tides.” even as we learn of Eibhlín Dubh’s frantic ride on her husband’s mare who brings her, ‘through the river Sullane and the Foherish’, to his murdered body, where she falls to his side on the ground and howls in anguish at the horror before her …

Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it up no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.

When I brew myself a cup of tea something always interrupts me, and my tea grows slowly cold while I buzz about more chores, with a baby on one shoulder and a dish-towel on the other. I have made my peace with drinking repeatedly abandoned and re-microwaved tea. Once the baby sleeps, I sit and blow again on that old steam, and Eibhlín Dubh tiptoes in to join me in my daydreams. I am never alone. (Ní Ghríofa, pp.127, 128)

In this sizzling debut prose publication, poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa brings vividly to life the 18^th century woman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Using her own fascination with the lament Eibhlín Dubh wrote for her murdered husband, Art O’Leary, Ní Ghríofa renders the lives of women in both the 18^th and 21^st century visible, relevant, vital. No more shadow women. Yes, this is a female text.³

1. I don’t normally care about these things, but it gives me pleasure that on the inside leaf of this dust-jacket is the legend, ‘7 of 500’, a limited first edition, from Kenny’s bookshop in Galway and with the author’s signature.

2. “Reading it I have been both exhilarated and terrified. Exhilarated by your use of language and by how you found the form for this book. As a writer, terrified that I now know what the bar is as I attempt to also write a female text. I feel that I have just read the MOTHER book and I want you to know that I am so grateful.” An extract from my ‘fangirl’ letter, written Sept 2020.

3. A Ghost in the Throat is one of the books in the Resource List in my book, Weather Report. Buy (and use), Weather Report: A 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale. It’s a day to a page and at the end of each day’s entry you are invited to write or draw one thing you found beautiful in your day. I promise you that it’s a rewarding and transformative practice, day by day. Yes, writing changes lives.

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