Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...

Eimear Arthur | Tolka Issue Eight, September 2025 Off the northwest coast of Ireland, between the white sands of Trá Bhán and the Atlantic’s roiling waves, there is a rocky islet, approximately 150 metres long and 100 metres wide, marked on Google Maps as Illanamarve. The islet transforms depending on point of observation: from certain parts of the surrounding landscape, it presents as one of the many promontories edging the shore, from other angles, it’s clearly a place distinct. Though visible from most nearby towns, such as Annagry and Carrickfinn, at closer range Illanamarve is intermittently blocked from view by rising topography. Just as you catch sight of it, you lose it again. Composed almost entirely of granite, the island has a shallow covering of soil and grass but is devoid of trees or shrubbery. The route from Trá Bhán to the island – passable only at low tide –...

Molly Hennigan | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Ghost) is a book that, in a swift, sensitive movement, has achieved something that many people speak about, think about and slowly edge closer towards after years of scholarship and research. Across various interviews and within the folds of the text itself, Ní Ghríofa relays how she comes to the story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill on the periphery of other paths that are well-worn. In Ghost, charting a timeline between the 1700s and the present moment, Ní Ghríofa traces the life of the poet Ní Chonaill through a series of personal reckonings. Stretching the text over the edges of her own experiences of motherhood and tragedy, she fills the gaps in our knowledge of the poet by listening out for echoes of her life today. Ní Ghríofa is not researching from within academia,...

Isobel O’Donovan | Tolka Issue Four, February 2025 I remember my mother’s voice in the kitchen, as though choruses of her could spill from an opened cupboard. Among the delft and vocal cords, a nestle of laughs and cries pushed through the yellow yolk of the sun streaming through the window. My infant head laid on her chest, ear pressed to lung like a shell whispering of the sea. The place where sleep seeps through a tablecloth like spilt milk, ink. When the Internet unfastens my limbs from my mind, it is to this warm, lullabied body that I long to return. Something punctures the memory – a niggling feeling of is that all? Such multitudes of experience shaped into an apron by the cookiecutter of nostalgia. It’s better now, I think, as the clock counts hours that are just for me, no nappy cloth frozen solid on the line....