An interview with Doireann Ní Ghríofa

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, and the book sings because of it. While necessary and formative in many ways, academic scholarship often stalls during the discussion of shifting imaginative paradigms or of narrative leaps. Through the writing of Ghost, Ní Ghríofa inhabits the leap, and dances in the space of it. Ghost is the winner of both Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2020 and the overall An Post Irish Book of the Year. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire and domesticity. Other awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy) and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her most recent book of poetry, To Star the Dark, is published by Dedalus Press.

This conversation came into being over a series of emails in the early spring of 2021. Skirting the edges of the interview itself were comparative notes measuring the weather: logging fresh snow, boring rain, wishing for sun. I think this interaction was borne out of the fact that there is some water between the islands we were inhabiting, both wondering how it was ‘over there’. I had felt held on Inis Oírr for months of lockdown, but then a photo of the island, taken from the window of Doireann’s sister’s house on the edge of the Burren in County Clare, situated me from another viewpoint, in a way that felt unexpectedly grounding. I saw the raindrops on her window in front of my eyes and envisioned myself somewhere on the island beyond. Effortlessly, even in small gestures and messages like this, Ní Ghríofa’s gaze and shifting perspective reaches outwards.

Molly Hennigan (MH): You’ve spoken about the idea of taking comfort and solace in the nourishing presence of ghosts and spirits in our lives. You have also shared the idea that a lot of people probably have these private ghosts who follow them around and whom they invite into their lives. So many readers have taken comfort in learning about Eibhlín Dubh as your ghost. Do you think there’s any way that people can be encouraged to tap or lean into these presences in their own lives?

Doireann Ní Ghríofa (DNG): I reckon that we each have our own, private sense of such mysteries and I’d shy away from encouraging anyone one way or the other – to each their own. I suppose I can only speak for my own sense of things. Since I was a girl, I have felt a gathering of such presences around me, although I wouldn’t necessarily call them ghosts. Some I have known in life, others were long gone by the time I arrived. I don’t think I’m alone in that – I suspect that many of us carry our dead with us. It’s all so peculiar, isn’t it? Today is the nineteenth day since my sister’s death. To bear witness to her dying was a reminder of how utterly strange a phenomenon death is. One moment, a person is simply present, and the next, gone. The breath leaves the body, and that’s it. The end. Where did she go? Where do any of our dead go? And yet, despite that finality, there are those who die and continue to feel close. Why? There’s a phrase I’ve been intrigued by for some time now, ‘to make one’s presence felt’. How could the dead do that, were it not for the reciprocity of our own acts of conjuring? Maybe we are complicit in our hauntings. Why do we do it, why do we invite them in? Well, the dead make for good company; they give good advice and good gifts – they send me my poems in oblique ways, as voices, or as nudges or signs. I often feel as though I am little more than a conduit (although I brazenly continue to sign my name to these books). Alice Notley said it best: ‘Sometimes I think that there is no poetry written without the intervention of the dead. It’s their voices speaking to you that allows you to find words from nowhere; they are the muse.’ I have felt that, and I have been grateful.

MH: I think you are getting at something really crucial when you speak about reciprocity. I also imagine, owing to your intuitive relationship to the idea of reciprocity, that there will be a strength and clarity to the continued presence of your sister in your family life. This idea of invitation and being complicit in our own hauntings seem to uncover something about the specific ways we choose to pay attention. I’m interested in the role of listening in writing. In terms of your interaction with Eibhlín Dubh, you’ve spoken about the sense of one woman speaking a poem into the afternoon in which she happens to be standing and another woman, three hundred years later, turning her ear to it and hearing her voice. You’ve also expressed gratitude for the fact that you can hear it and you can understand it. This is such an important point, especially when we consider the risk we often run in work that attempts to recover a voice but slips into speaking on its behalf, as opposed to carving out the space for that voice to be heard. While you take imaginative paths to get closer to Eibhlín Dubh, you seem to have a clear sense of a boundary that is not to be crossed, and that to do so would feel like trespass or theft. Can you talk about the idea of writing as listening?

DNG: Listening was a deeply important element of this book from the start. The more I listened for Eibhlín Dubh’s voice, the more I perceived little echoes of her in my own life. There were times when everything around me would suddenly just hum with her presence. I was always listening for her voice, but also listening for her footfall and other, more oblique signs of her presence. Those signs, echoes and omens I was listening out for all felt significant when I came to the act of writing, too. I wanted to build the book in such a way that the reader could listen out for her as I had, hearing for themself the little echoes that chimed between my life and hers. Throughout the writing process, this book had the working title Dubh (A Book of Echoes) – maybe that shows how fundamental the act of listening was during the process of writing the book. In terms of ‘giving voice’, there were times, poking around what traces I could find of her life – its shadowy corners, its intimacies – that I felt . . . I’m not sure what to call it. Reticence? Reticence. She had done nothing to deserve this – a random stranger from the future, poking through her secrets. I didn’t want to add to the indignity by attempting to put words in her mouth, on top of everything else. I wanted to listen out for what was left of her voice, rather than speak on her behalf. I don’t know if I was successful, but that was my hope.

MH: I am mindful that this next comment technically flies in the face of everything we are saying about speaking on behalf of others but, from conversations I have had, there is a clear feeling among readers that your act of listening in this text, and encouraging the reader to turn their ear the same way, is a fundamental part of Ghost. There seems to be a new pace and pulse driving Irish writing and publishing forward at the moment, particularly in the arena of non-fiction. Your own publisher Tramp Press is leading that charge, having published ambitious and award-winning works of non-fiction, including Ian Maleney’s Minor Monuments, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and your own book. In terms of your own relationship with form and experimentation, you’ve described the poem itself as the thing that drew you further towards Eibhlín Dubh’s story and life, and so, towards the undertaking of a prose book project. You also talk about sections of the book moving like a poem or a prose poem. What leaps and shifts would you like to see happen in Irish writing in the coming years?

DNG: Such a tricky question! It’s difficult to imagine books that have yet to be written and writers whose pages we have yet to meet. There have been such interesting and unexpected shifts in the books we’ve seen published in Ireland in the past decade, so many extraordinary books of non-fiction by all those you mention, and so many more, such as Mark O’Connell, Sara Baume and Kevin Breathnach, among others. Certainly the existence of an independent publisher like Tramp Press is vital, as it allows a writer to imagine a home for strange work, for artistic leaps and cartwheels; there’s a sense of permission there before one even begins. Similarly, literary journals like the Dublin Review, gorse, Banshee, the Tangerine and the Stinging Fly hold space for writers to try new things within their pages, with the kind of rigorous editorial support that allows one to grow in one’s craft. That’s invaluable. Many of these are funded by the Arts Council, enabling editors to support writers through artistic risks and the creation of new texts. So although there’s always going to be additional supports we might hope for, we are fortunate in the literary landscape that has been nurtured here and in the books that have grown from that. I hope that the work that is written in coming years continues to morph and grow and challenge us as readers, offering us glimpses into lives, experiences and visions we have yet to experience.

MH: In the process of writing Ghost, you spent significant time with other books that are doing similar work, attending to the lives of other women in their own ways, including Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden and Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter. Are there certain sections or lines from these texts that struck a chord with you? Or indeed, any other books in this vein that buoyed you up in your writing process?

DNG: Returning to my little paperback of Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, I find a ridiculous number of passages underlined, so much marginalia and pencil scribbles. I see that I was very into this early passage, encapsulating the project of her whole book. Having been asked to compile a brief biography of Barbara Loden for an encyclopaedia of film, Léger finds herself reaching towards something larger, in spite of herself. The line I’ve chosen here feels to me like the artistic statement from which the whole book blooms. Translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Manon, it becomes: ‘I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her own story through that of another woman’. Hmm, I thought, ‘a woman telling her own story through that of another woman’ – isn’t that what I am trying to do as well? From Zambreno, I held tight to the lines: ‘The blur of language. I still cannot catch it.’ And there was another line that meant the world to me as I was working towards Ghost, and still does, which I read in Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack and Honey: ‘I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and talk about the construction of subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever.’ I realised that I had ‘made friends with the dead’ in Eibhlín Dubh and I found that I wanted ‘to write back’, too.

MH: Recognising in Léger the task of architecture you set yourself, the blurring of language in Zambreno and the ability to make friends with the dead through Ruefle, clearly opened up the possibilities of what your writing could become when you were still at that work-in-progress stage. What other artforms do you find most enriching for your writing?

DNG: Oh, visual art. Intensely so. Engaging with art enriches my work in two ways – in my response to the piece itself, the sensations and ideas it provokes, and second, in my sense of admiration for the artist themselves, at a human level, at a craft level. To observe the fruits of another life devoted to art is (to me) intensely moving. Engaging with good art – by an artist I admire, Dorothy Cross, say, or Salvatore of Lucan, or Vera Klute – gives me a fidgety feeling, an impatience to hurry away and try to make something good myself. It fires me up. I carry those sparks onto my page.

MH: Can you tell us a little bit about To Star the Dark, your new poetry collection with Dedalus Press?

DNG: They are strange poems, poems of tethers and blades, of blood and jellyfish, of subterranean car parks and lambs and the moon . . . There’s even a poem in there about a GIF of Nosferatu. I began to write To Star the Dark six years ago. My process is such that I tend to work on several projects at once, sidestepping between them, so I’ll often have a number of poems or translations on the go, an essay and a commission or two. I like to be busy! What’s strange and interesting about working like this is how certain motifs or images can make themselves felt across several projects – some ideas get the better of me, I just can’t make them sit still. So my starlings follow me through these poems, just as they did in Ghost. It’s strange to think that both books will be published within a year of each other – one in August, one in April – in many ways they are very close. I feel a bit odd at the moment, now that both of these books have left my desk. I spent so many years working on the pair of them. Everything feels very open all of a sudden. I am eagerly attending to the signs that are beginning to appear; I trust that they’ll point me in the direction of my next book.

MH: Returning to your relationship with visual arts, the cover art for the poetry collection is striking. Is there a story behind the choice of this Tom Climent painting?

DNG: There certainly is. From the first time I saw that painting on a wall of a restaurant in Ennis, I was very taken with it. Any time we returned there over following years, my eye was drawn to it. Whenever I was walking past, I’d peer in at it from the street. One day, the painting was gone. I asked the staff – had it been sold? Put in storage? – but no one knew what had happened. It was lost to me. Then one day I happened upon it, hung outside the toilet in the hotel adjoining the restaurant. Curious about the artist, I posted a picture of the painting on Instagram and, within minutes, Tom Climent replied that he had painted it back in 1996. It’s one of the joys of poetry publishing in Ireland that poets are encouraged to source cover artwork. This beautiful painting seemed such a perfect match for the tone and subject of the poems. I summoned my courage and asked Tom whether he’d be open to that, and I was giddy when he agreed. When one of my sons asked what I was so happy about, I showed him the painting and said that some day it’d be the cover of one of my books. ‘So that’s why it looks so familiar,’ he said.

MH: In Ghost, we encounter and re-encounter the pivotal line, ‘this is a female text’, which you have referred to as a refrain that insists upon itself over and again, as a voice coming from elsewhere. As you uncover the meaning of this phrase across the text you pay particular attention to multiple females, including Eibhlín Dubh, her sister, her mother, your daughter and even the female horse. I am wondering how you feel about female lineage and ancestry. What role do you see it playing in your work?

DNG: I’m not sure I ever fully understood (or understand still) what is meant by the phrase ‘a female text’. It came from Elsewhere; it isn’t really mine. I didn’t come up with it, it just arrived out of the blue, as depicted in the book. I was leaving Kilcrea Abbey with my daughter and the phrase, ‘this is a female text’, burst into my thoughts and continued to repeat itself and repeat itself until I arrived home and wrote it down. Throughout the long process that followed, that phrase kept repeating itself to me and I found myself asking questions of it. If I was buttoning my daughter into a cardigan knitted by her grandmother, for example, I would think, hmm, could this be a female text? Much of the work of Ghost represented my efforts to puzzle my way into it. The brazenness of the phrase has a kind of definitive ring to it that my own thoughts lack.
Female ancestry is very interesting to me. I am so taken with circularity: the repetitions of character or emotional or physical traits across the generations; the ways in which we take pride in our female ancestry and the ways in which we ignore or reject it; the ways in which we absorb the lessons of our foremothers and the ways in which we repeat their choices and their mistakes; the way we impress such choices on our own daughters. It’s all endlessly, endlessly fascinating to me. The depth held in a phrase like ‘you have her eyes’ – I could think about that for years.

MH: Staying for a moment with these many repetitions you reflect on and the very idea of a phrase bursting into your thoughts, brazen and ringing, do you have any vivid memories of your first encounters with the work of certain female Irish poets?

DNG: I was maybe thirteen or fourteen when I was given the anthology Real Cool: Poems to Grow Up With for Christmas. The lad on the cover was wearing torn jeans and eighteen-hole Docs, and that was all that was needed to be cool in my eyes. I vividly remember the sensation of opening that book and reading Paula Meehan’s ‘The Pattern’ – a sensation somewhere between shivers and goosebumps. That poem is so unbelievably powerful on familial ambivalences, class, matrilineal legacies and ‘the sting of her hand / across my face in one of our wars / when we had grown bitter and apart’. Even now, that poem never fails to ignite a bodily response in me. I was similarly struck by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s series of poems tying linguistic rupture and trauma to the motif of na murúcha. Both poets I admired greatly from my very first encounters with their work, and I still do.

MH: Such a wonderful Meehan poem to dwell on. In many ways it laces through our conversation here: ‘We might have made a new start / as women without tags like mother, wife, / sister, daughter, taken our chance from there’. I suppose it’s the same question approached from a different angle in Ghost. A question of holding to those tags and seeing them anew. Also, on the torn jeans and eighteen-hole Docs from the cover, I can imagine young readers now feeling similarly about the cover art of your collection Lies. I remember first seeing that and thinking, this is the cool messy bun every single one of the girls in my school (myself included) are trying and failing to achieve each morning. Coming back to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry being similarly influential for you and thinking of the fite-fuaite interweaving of Irish and English in Ghost, I would love to hear more about your translation process with ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’. How did you embark upon it?

DNG: Poems (to me) feel like haunted things – they are, aren’t they? – little fossils of another’s thought and breath that have somehow survived after their deaths. I was so into that idea whenever I read Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire aloud to myself – in hearing my own voice speaking Eibhlín Dubh’s words. It felt like her voice surging up from my throat. The poem as time machine! That was a very particular and treasured sensation for me. So in translating her poem to English, I was determined to guard that essence, the particularity of her voice. Of course, I failed. Still, I learnt so much from the attempt. The image that comes to mind now, when I think of reading versus translating a poem, is the difference between simply sliding an antique ring onto a finger versus pinching it between fingertips and lifting it to a magnifying glass. In the act of translation, I wasn’t just reading Eibhlín Dubh’s lines aloud anymore, I was examining them with a precision and a determination that ended up illuminating the poem in a new way. I could hear her voice more clearly than ever before. So even though I deemed my own translation a failure, I wouldn’t change the attempt for the world. The ways in which we experience artistic failure is endlessly interesting to me. I fail so much and so often. These days I try to muster a little fondness towards my many failed poems . . . but I’m sorry to say that my default is a sort of viciousness – I want to knife them, to burn them, to obliterate them. I can’t bear them. Maybe that sense of revulsion is part of what drives me onward – within the disgust lies the desire to try again.

This interview first appeared in Issue One of Tolka (May 2021). Issue One is now sold out on our website, but may still be available from certain stockists.