A book of creative nonfiction that straddles genres, the work is, above all, what Irish poet Ní Ghríofa says it is in its first sentence, in its final sentence, and throughout: a female text. It is about women's desire and women's disappearances. In it she pursues and makes connections with the hidden life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, the 18th century poet and composer of the esteemed "Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire", an oral lament she composed following the murder of her husband while pregnant with their third baby.

Desire features strongly at first. Eibhlín's desire for Art is present in the first lines of her lament:

The day I first saw you
by the market's thatched roof,
how my eye took a shine to you,
how my heart took delight in you,
I fled my companions with you,
to soar far from home with you.

She sees in the wives of the city merchants their own desire for her handsome, fearless husband when he walks down the streets:

How well, they could see
what a hearty bed-mate you'd be,
what a man to share a saddle with,
what a man to spark a child with.

This desire is further powerfully expressed in the language of the flesh when she discovers his dead body, Art having been shot while on horseback:

Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.

Ní Ghríofa was captivated by this description of female desire from school age, and now as an adult, married with several children, in passionate love with her own husband, she identifies with and sees its connection to her own life. While we have many descriptions and musings on male desire, how welcome for a forthright depiction of female desire to get a turn.

Once the burden on my breasts diminishes, my inner clockwork clicks back to its usual configuration, bringing with it a hormonal swerve I hadn't expected. Desire returns, slamming open the door. Desire flings me to my knees, makes me tremble and beg, makes me crawl and gasp in the dark. Desire leaves me sprawled over beds and over tables, animal, throbbing, and wet. Every time I come, I weep. I missed it, desire, blissful and ordinary. I can't remember a time when I felt so relieved, or so happy.

Rediscovering this poem, making this connection, Ní Ghríofa now becomes intent on learning more about Eibhlín's life, and is aghast to find it largely missing. We don't know what became of her after Art's murder, how long she lived, where she lived, what she did, where she died, even where she is buried. The texts we have from that time are almost entirely about men, and even though Eibhlín's nephew was the political leader Daniel O'Connell, with lots of scholarship dedicated to his life and family, little of Eibhlín has survived. Ní Ghríofa decides to pursue the physical record and physical remains to retrieve what she can of the female life that lies hidden, that has disappeared.

The back and forth in the work between Ní Ghríofa's own life and her attempts at a reconstruction of Eibhlín's life seeks to build echoes between the two women's lives, and perhaps in a sense the lives of all women. Knowing all the details of her own life, and few of the details of Eibhlín's, it's a work that leans on poetic language and imagining what is not known based on what is. It's also a work of exhaustion, of frustration, before a final letting go of mysteries and language. ( )

Amazing story of a young Irish mother who from her schooldays has been obsessed with a long poem [ballad?] "Keen [Lament] for Art O Laoghaire". She admires the heroine of the poem, Eibhlin Dubh [Eileen the Dark], Art's wife, who has eloped with him and now tells his story, mourning him after he is killed. The author spends a long time researching the poem, translating it from the Gaelic to English and finding out all she can about Eibhlin and her extended family. Exquisitely written, and very poignant. She includes bilingual versions of this extended poem. ( )

when it's good, it's very good ; when it is bad, it tries too hard, falls flat, and is kind of conventional and corny and very much in the spirit of this age.
It gets a bit lost towards the second half, meandering around in the author's thoughts and musings which are not strung together in a way that is clear to follow.
She overdoes it a bit too and it's a bit embarrassing in parts. I saw an interview with her in which she admitted that her favorite part of the book has to do with Airt O' Leary's horse. : ( I thought that was among the corniest and most embarrassing parts of the book. ( )

Eine Ausnahmesituation bringt die Essayistin und Poetin Doireann Ní Ghríofa zu einer Adligen, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, die zwei Jahrhunderte vor ihr lebte und ihre Gedanken und Emotionen ebenfalls in Gedichtform äußerte. Als erwachsene Frau nimmt sie den Text, den sie bereits in der Schulzeit einmal lesen musste, gänzlich anders wahr und spürt eine Verbindung, der sie nachgeht, wenn sie nicht gerade den Haushalt schmeißt oder sich um ihre drei Kinder kümmert. Eine Verbindung zwischen zwei Frauen über Zeit und gesellschaftliche Veränderungen hinweg.

Die Autorin hat für das Buch „Ein Geist in der Kehle“ eine Mischform von Texten gewählt, die am besten zum Ausdruck bringt, was sie leitet und wie sehr die Texte von Eibhlín Dubh sie bewegen. Das Schwangersein und Mutterwerden lässt sie mehr denn je als Frau empfinden und schafft ein starkes Band zu jener Frau, die heute zum irischen Nationalmythos zählt.

Beide Leben werden clever miteinander verwoben. Das der Autorin ist für mich besonders intensiv im Ausdruck, als sie ihre Tochter zur Welt bringt und bange Wochen nach der Frühgeburt durchlebt. Die Erschöpfung und Zweifel werden in jeder Zeile lebendig und treffen einem auch als Leserin unmittelbar, auch wenn man eine derartige Erfahrung nicht machen musste. Vor allem das Gefühl, in ihrer ureigenen Funktion als Mutter, die das in ihr heranwachsende Kind nicht gut versorgt, versagt zu habt, trifft die Autorin hart.

Im Kontrast dazu Eibhlín Dubh, die einerseits stark wirkt und doch nach dem Tod ihres Mannes das Schicksal der Frauen ihrer Zeit erleidet: sie verschwindet. Sie wird unsichtbar, nicht mehr erwähnt, weder in offiziellen noch in privaten Dokumenten. Einzig durch ihre Söhne lebt sie weiter und sehr gelegentlich als Randfigur, die jedoch nur beim Mädchen Rufnamen genannt wird.

Die Autorin nennt ihren Text feministisch. Nicht nur die beiden Protagonistinnen, sondern das, was sie gesellschaftlich zu Frauen macht, stehen im Zentrum. Die Angst zu versagen, die gesellschaftlichen Erwartungen nicht zu erfüllen, wirken stark durch. Und auch das Verschwinden, in dem Moment, wo der Gatte nicht mehr da ist, ist wohl ein sehr weibliches Phänomen.

Ein starker Text, der sich einer Genre-Zuordnung versagt. Eine feministische Perspektive, die einerseits sehr persönlich und doch auch wieder universell ist. Sprachlich außergewöhnlich und gerade in den poetischen Passagen ein literarischer Hochgenuss. ( )

What a powerful and empowering female text. I found some parts more compelling than others but overall I loved the writing and the search for the information about Irish poet, Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill. To me these excerpts (as best as I could hear as I listened to the audiobook) capture the elements and sections of this book that I enjoyed the most:

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.

Such furies burn and dissipate and burn again for this is a poem fuelled by the twin fires of anger and desire.

She is in pain. As it the poem itself. The text is a text in pain. It aches.

As he dreamt, I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.

My document doesn't hold her voice, and as such, I judge it a failure. An inevitable failure but a failure none the less. I try to accept this fact while showing myself compassion. I've gained so much from my work. For one thing I've learned is the element I cherish most in Eibhlin Dubh's work does not lie in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over it. No, my favourite element hovers beyond the text. In the untranslatable pale space between stanzas where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs. Still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried on to breathe elsewhere.

I wonder what I might learn of Eibhlin Dubh's days were I to veer away from the scholarship I have simply accepted thus far. I think again of those blunt brief sketches of Aunt and Wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women that knew her instead?

Definitely worth reading to explore some of the ideals of motherhood and the power of the 'female text'. ( )