Doireann Ní Ghríofa: From Ghost in the Throat to Star the Dark
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is about to publish her latest collection of poetry, To Star The Dark.
After a year of Covid, launching a book during a pandemic has become a more commonplace occurrence for writers. It is nonetheless still a strange experience, especially for those who, like Doireann Ní Ghríofa, delight in performing their work to an audience. When her book A Ghost in the Throat was published last August, it had already been put forward by six months and she could have been forgiven for feeling unsure about how it would be received. There was no such uncertainty among readers who took the book to their hearts in an extraordinary way.
“It has been a phenomenon, and it has really taken me by surprise, hugely so, and it is still taking me by surprise every day,” says Ní Ghríofa, who grew up in Clare and now lives with her family in Tower, Co Cork. “I have been so moved by people’s generosity, and kindness, sharing their thoughts and feelings as they read it.”
Ní Ghríofa pays tribute to independent publishers Tramp Press for their work on the book, which has already racked up numerous awards and prizes, including An Post Irish Book of the Year.
“I think I was extraordinarily fortunate to have Tramp Press behind me, they lifted this book and carried it out to readers. It started to build into this sort of electric word-of-mouth. It just grabbed people’s imaginations. It is a very mysterious thing that I certainly don’t understand as a writer and as someone who came to writing through Irish language poetry, this level of interaction of an artistic work with this number of readers is something unusual for me.
"It has given me a renewed appreciation of that ordinary but magical connection between the writer and the reader. It is something that has been taken from us as a literary community — when you do a public reading, the audience is there and responding to the work, you get to meet people afterwards, all of that has disappeared.”
Ní Ghríofa has built up a reputation as one of Ireland’s most talented poets in the last decade or so, her work winning numerous awards and prizes. A Ghost in the Throat was her prose debut, a raw and haunting blend of essay, auto-fiction and poetry probing a connection across the centuries with Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, author of the famous 18th century lament Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire. Ní Ghríofa says she had no particular plan for how it was written, describing it as a process which she felt was somehow beyond her control.
“I think anyone who has read the book will understand it when I say that book kind of grabbed a hold of me and insisted on being what it is. I never really had a conscious plan of ‘I’m going to write a really unusual book, this is the way it is going to be, I’m going to experiment a little bit with this genre, this genre and this genre’. I was sitting down, trying to almost explain to myself how I had come to be so fascinated by the life of Eibhlín Dubh, how I had come to devote so much of my own life to the discovery of her life.”
Much of A Ghost in the Throat was written in time snatched from her busy life as a mother-of-four, including regular sessions in a multi-storey car park — something which has proved a source of fascination to Cork readers in particular.
“I love this discussion so much. Anyone around the country, they just take it at face value, that I wrote it on the roof of a car park. In Cork, everyone is like, ‘but which car park was it — because it must have cost a lot of money if it was Paul Street or Merchant’s Quay’. My youngest child was in playschool in Ballincollig so it was the roof of the free multi-storey there. People were even saying to me on Instagram that they were zooming into the background of selfies I was putting up, wondering how much money I was spending… No, it was all free, I just had to make a purchase below.”
Ní Ghríofa is now approaching her second pandemic book launch, with the publication of her latest poetry collection, To Star the Dark, by Dedalus Press. She says that putting it together gave her an opportunity to take a bird’s eye view of her work.
“You are looking at the bones of six or seven years, putting this collection together. As you are composing them, they seem like distinct pieces of work. Then when you come to the end of it, you’re saying, 'okay, I’ve actually made a patchwork quilt here', there are patterns when you attend to it that are visible throughout the whole as well as in the parts."
Ní Ghríofa says the collection comes back to themes she has been interested in throughout her work, particularly the past. "I come back to the past again and again, especially walking the streets in Cork…. it is so compact as a city and yet there are so many layers of history contained there. I have never gotten used to the idea that history is just history, it is all around us, get over it. I just can’t get over it. I love it, it blows my mind. That fascination makes itself felt every time I pick up a pen and put it to paper.”
Ní Ghríofa believes poetry should be accessible in the same way that music is, and anyone who has heard her read her work will know how vital that basic connection is to her.
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"I was put off by it, I thought it was kind of boring, kind of weird, I thought there was one correct answer you had to find to every poem. It took me a long time to realise that when you come to a poem, it is possible to come to it like you would with a song on the radio — to just listen to a poem, to take pleasure in the music of a poem, to read it out loud, to see what it conjures in your own imagination.
"It took me a long time to let myself into that pleasure but once I did, it became really rewarding. I have always wanted everyone to feel welcome in my own poems, that, no matter where I am, if someone asks me to stand up and say a poem, that I can do it and no-one will feel weird.”
The Irish poetry scene is thriving at the moment, with our wonderful array of established poets joined by an impressive wave of emerging talent. Ní Ghríofa has recently been enjoying the work of one of Ireland’s greatest living poets.
“During the pandemic, a new book came out from Paula Meehan, As If By Magic, drawing on so many of her extraordinary poems over the decades. I kept that on the dresser and dipped in and out of it so much. I was astonished by the number of extraordinary poems she has composed over her lifetime. I have yet to come to a Paula Meehan poem and not be very deeply moved by it.”
Poetry has proven to be a particularly accessible art from during the pandemic, lending itself to our diminishing concentration spans and the posting of inspirational verses on social media.
“It’s an aspect of literature that despite its brevity can be really attractive to people because it is really dense, vivid language with so much feeling impressed and etched into it, and people respond to that very strongly,” says Ní Ghríofa. “I have really clung to poetry in my life and the sense of just opening a book at random with my morning coffee and reading a poem has really kept me going. We are so fortunate to have that, aren’t we?”
- To Star the Dark, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, published by Dedalus Press is out on Wednesday, April 7.
