A GHOST IN THE THROAT, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa • Book Reviews

Fiction by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, reviewed by Beth Kephart
A GHOST IN THE THROAT (Biblioasis)

“This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion.

A female text because Ní Ghríofa suffuses her days with the domestic arts of hoovering, dusting, folding, mothering, and bends her prose toward those ticking rhythms when she carves out a moment and writes.

A female text because Ní Ghríofa carries the lament of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman of the late eighteenth century, in her bones as she works—a poem called Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem of howling grief erupted from the murder of the poet’s husband.

A female text because the words have risen up in Ní Ghríofa and stayed:

This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours.

Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography is thin, vanished, vanquished, even, within histories written mostly about men, by men. She wants us to understand what it is to be driven to exhaustion by the exhilarating desire to find out, to learn more, to exhale the ether of an obsession. She wants us to hear the mewl of her babies in the background as she thinks, the mechanical sigh of the breast pump, the sounds of others sleeping while she lays awake at night, dreaming her way toward Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.

I wish to shout because this book is so profoundly beautiful and so beautifully profound—a female text with so much to say about the ways we serve others (our families, our homes, our obsessions) and the ways that serving shapes us, and how being alone is never being alone, and how imagination always leaves us a few truths short, but it is what we have, it is the best we can do, it may even be the best of us. Imagination yields.

Imagination runs thick in Ní Ghríofa, who, even as a child, was scolded for weaving her dreams into history, her fantasies into facts. She’ll plunk rain into an evening, wash mud through a ditch, instigate a flirtation as she builds her theories about the great Irish noblewoman who, when alerted by an empty-saddle horse that her husband was in danger, leapt upon that horse’s back and rode and rode until she found the man she loved in a pool of his own blood and knelt and drank that blood in her great grief. Ní Ghríofa will haunt city streets and a graveyard for proof of what was—conjuring what is not there, intuiting what must have been. During crowded domestic days, in crowded spaces, over many years, Ní Ghríofa will chase this ghost of the past, and have I said yet how much I love this book, how I clung to it as proof that there is still something new in the literary world, still something worth shouting about?

I wish to shout about this. About a book with chapter titles like “cold lips to cold lips” and “blot. blot.” and “wild bees and their fizzy curiosities.” With lines like: “To work this soil is to sift the archeology of a stranger’s thoughts.” With confessions like: “I have held her and held her, only to find that she holds me too, close as ink on paper and steady as a pulse.” With passages like:

Back at my own clothesline, I think of those women. I arrange my body as they did: I look up. The clouds seem a flood, suspended far overhead. Our pasts are deep underwater. Our pasts are submerged in elsewheres.

It has given us the genuine miracle of A Ghost in the Throat.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely-published essayist. Wife | Daughter | Self: a memoir in essays is her new book. More at bethkephartbooks.com.