William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility …” On March 4, the Irish Studies program welcomed acclaimed Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa as guest speaker for its annual D’Arcy McGee Lecture, showing that Wordsworth is not alone in seeing poetry as a matter of feelings and inspiration.
Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist who writes in both Irish and English. Her prose bestseller A Ghost in the Throat, an inventive hybrid of essay and fiction, was crowned Book of the Year at the 2020 Irish Book Awards. She also has six award-winning poetry collections, the most recent of which is Lies (an Irish Times Book of the Year and Irish Independent Book of 2018).
“To give a lecture like this isn’t something that I’m used to at all,” Ní Ghríofa confessed at the outset of the virtual public lecture, which drew over 100 people. “I’ve no academic expertise that would qualify me to do so, well beyond what I’ve taught myself in quite a muddled way. I’m just a person who has slowly, over many years and with many missteps, taught themselves to become a writer.”
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Ní Ghríofa added that she came to writing comparatively late in life: “I held a passion for reading, though, much earlier – I was a very bookish child, the kid who wants to bring home more books from the library than my arms could ever carry – but I only began to write in my late twenties, and I’ve never shaken off my astonishment at the fact that a life can take a drastic turn like that, that we can suddenly become absorbed in a new devotion, that feels like it comes upon us totally unexpectedly, and we find that it has changed everything.”
Through her poetry, Ní Ghríofa explores the journeys of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. In her talk, she revealed how grief and motherhood sparked her way into poetry: “For a long time, I struggled to speak of that grief, but poetry allowed me a way to speak of the pain and longing and the loss that I felt, even after my subsequent children were born, for that first lost pregnancy,” Ní Ghríofa said before reciting a selection from “Sólás” in the book Lies, her collection of poems with a refreshing yet crafty presentation in both tongues.
“This poem grew from the moment I learned that in Irish folklore, the souls of miscarried and stillborn infants were believed to return as little birds – sedge-warblers – to comfort their mothers with birdsong,” she added.
The poet also explained why her lecture focused on these interconnections between grief and literature. “My younger sister Éibhleann died very recently,” she said. “It’s such a painful loss, and something I can’t really bring myself to speak about very much. It’s a particularly lonely time to lose a family member, with the pandemic, when we’re are deprived of the company and comfort of others. But my writing practice has helped me through these difficult days and kept my head above water, if only barely some days, by connecting again with how grief has been such a deep source of my work.”
After thanking her audience in both Irish and English, Ní Ghríofa reminded us that reading and writing poetry is good for healing and transformation: “[Poetry] has never failed to bring me comfort, even now, as we persevere through such dark, uncertain times.”