RaveThe Cardiff ReviewRefusing to be bound by the strict categories of memoir or biography, the text charts Ní Ghríofa’s obsession with first the poem then the life of eighteenth-century noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill ... Ní Ghríofa becomes consumed by a desire to know more about the woman who penned it. The keenness of this desire is striking, as it surpasses an idle poetic interest to become inexplicably urgent ... They also remind the reader that this is a text as much about the searcher as the searched for, as much about why a young woman might feel drawn to the mystery of another life as about that life itself. Eibhlín’s loves, her sacrifices and her desires are made bitingly immediate once more, as Ní Ghríofa frames them within her own experiences. Ní Ghríofa often refers to her lack of academic qualifications for this kind of archival research, and ultimately the paper trail peters out. Eibhlin remains a shadow woman, erased by a history that cares little for the informal records of women’s lives and letters. We are left with many questions and a lot of conjecture. The gaps in the record become a space for poetry and imagination to grow, filling the lacunae with a sense of wonder and strange kinship ... It is the vulnerability of this text that is most moving. Unsheltered by alias or character, Ní Ghríofa is endlessly and sometimes brutally honest, about desire, motherhood, the repetitive thrum of routine and the fragments of pain and joy that go into making a life. Through the framework of the search for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa is able to examine who she is and where she came from with a nuance and beauty that no family census records could ever provide.
