Doireann N Ghrofa's "A Ghost in the Throat": A Journey Through History and Mythology

John Vincent Burgon: A brilliant way to pay tribute to a haunting poem, with a masterful translation (as far as I know). I will return many times to this book. A sensitive narrative ending with the poem. Thank you Doireann.

United Kingdom on Aug 29, 2023

DJL: This is such a unique tale. It is not describable. Prepare to read it in one sitting. Become obsessed with its pages just as the storyteller becomes obsessed with the women before her and particularly one women. The story of these women at first seems specific to them, but you soon realize that there is a universality to it in that all women “live in the shadow of men” and that their stories have to be teased out of the stories of men. I only left one star out because I could not relate to the obsessive nature of the narrator. I so desperately wanted her to stop living in the past and enjoy every moment in the present. However, where would we be without poets’, writers’, and artists’ obsessive natures? We need their steadfast research, their sleepless nights, and their inability to cease their obsessions to fulfill our own need to drink in their art. Read this treasure and think deeply about all of the women that came before us.

United States on Jul 16, 2023

Kathy J. Phillips: The connections between the 18th-c woman's life and the present author's life are tenuous. Ghriofa segues from the fact that the earlier author had 3 children to her own 3 children. but when a doctor warns of a possible problem with the 3rd birth, she denies it's even possible, and then insults nurses too. Maybe I should excuse her fear, but she seems childish and mean. And she segues from the earlier woman's looking down at her murdered husband's body, to her own experiences in a college dissecting class, but they're very different emotions. However, I did enjoy her translation of the older author's long poem: great rhythms and strong word choice.

United States on May 02, 2023

Anne-Marie: This is described as a book that doesn’t fit any particular genre, and it is so hard to explain. I had seen this book when it won the Irish book of the year in 2020, and I generally like books published by @tramppress . However, everything about it, from the cover, to the ghostly title put me off, so it took a buddy read for me to tackle it. After the first day, I was hooked, the writing was so amazing that for me it didn’t really matter what the book was about. This was odd for me, as I describe myself as a lazy reader - I like things spelt out. The buddy reader chat was hilarious, in that we often had different views on what the words meant. And then I was told it was non-fiction! This really brought me out of my comfort zone, and I’m so glad I finally got around to it.

United Kingdom on Apr 23, 2023

Lotrec: Thoroughly researched and informational about irish landscape culture and traditions. It shows important advances in female texts. I would appreciate a guide to Irish pronunciation since the spelling and orthography seems to be made to confuse English readers

Spain on Mar 24, 2023

jt: She has a lyrical gift that serves her well in parts of the book where she describes teenage angst, marriage, motherhood and breastfeeding, and that kept me turning the pages. However, she also has a feminist chip on her shoulder and has absorbed just enough academic feminist baloney to trip herself up. For example, everything is 'a text' including her own breastmilk, and the book itself is announced as a female text that seems to only grudgingly admit male readers. She apparently doesn't realise what a cliche this is, or that it comes directly out of the academic world she constantly animadverts to, except it's a feminist-dominated academia now, replacing that of the male scholars through whose critical apparatus she resents having to encounter Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill. At no point does she give them credit for contributing to the work's survival. Instead she insinuates that they were chauvinistically interested in Eileen Dubh because she was related to Daniel O'Connell, as if people don't have an understandable curiosity about talented lineages; and that our lack of biographical knowledge about Eibhlin Dubh is a result of sexism, as if it wasn't matched by ignorance about...

United Kingdom on Sep 07, 2022

CS: ’This is a female text borne of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes.’
‘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.’
‘This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.’
‘This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in.’

’When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.
Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming.’

Her teacher is the one who introduces her to this woman, who makes the story of this woman come alive, a woman who experienced the loss of a love in 1773. A woman who goes to his side, and kneeling over him, her voice ’rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable… a ‘caoineadh’, a keen...

United States on Mar 12, 2022

Gerald O'Malley: This is a very, very good book. A real celebration of female individuals and feminism. The author explores the origins of one of the most famous poems of the 18th century and the woman who wrote it. She sling-shots between 18th century and modern day Ireland drawing from her own experiences giving birth, breastfeeding and running a household full of men with that of the 18th century poet and mother. The author is a poet and frames her observations and comparisons of the female experience in remarkably colorful and creative ways, folding phrases and melting paragraphs into each other, uncovering truths and revealing secrets. Digging through centuries of birth records and cemetery tracings and hospital records and newspapers, the author's search for the fate of the 18th century poet is a sad story - an example of the literary tyranny of men and the ignoring of the vital sex. Ghost in the Throat is a remarkable achievement.

United States on Feb 15, 2022

Thomas Swaak: Doireann abducts the unsuspecting spirit imbibing her majestic, poetic prose to the sweet timelessness of Kairos. In one fell breathless swoop she opens up dual worlds of her own authored life and that of a a female chimera lost in the mists of time, whose legacy is a keening that still etches the current soul. Her gift left me moved, astonished, aching for more. Highly recommended!

Netherlands on Feb 02, 2022

Patricia Ennis: This book was phenomenal. A woman's text for sure. Women live shared lives. This book explores that. I found it so hard to put the book down and am dreading when i have finished reading it. Not quite done yet so slowing down my reading of it to try to prevent it being over. Don't know what I will do when I have actually completed this book. Probably put it down with an enormous sigh and regret that it is finished. Reads so much to me like Sebastian Barry. Same feel to the writing. Just lovely. Don't want to finish the book.

I love the way the author writes the English translation in the Irish way of speech. Perhaps you would miss that if you were not Irish and/or did not speak Gaelige.

I have seen some comments saying she uses the word "milk" too much. I disagree. Women have been overlooked and their contributions assigned to the irrelevant for so long... "She is on her period", "She is pregnant", "She is menopausal", "It is just hormones". NO, IT IS NOT.

Females, throughout history have been connected to each other by the liquid which has kept humankind alive. That dreaded word, ascribed to females only, MILK.

This is a female book as the author...

United States on Oct 12, 2021