A review by cameronfrye
A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

A book that intimately blurs the lines between past and present. History is humanised and brought achingly to life in these pages. Figures of the past feel close like breath on the back of your neck. Art and Eibhlín are so strikingly real, like you could reach out and grasp them by the hand and try to ease their grief. Motherhood and the erasure of women's labours and lives is perilous and full of longing and is the life force beating within the heart of this text. I have always been fascinated with the humanity of history; of the echoes of repeated practices, reformed according to circumstances and personalities yet very much the same. This book absolutely captured that feeling of close/distance that comes from touching the walls of some ancient place, or dancing the same formations as generations passed. That feeling of your movements mirroring an infinite number of others, of being an apex of inherited dreams, sorrows, customs and language. Just gorgeous.