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 infoWhat 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'....more
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