On 'rooms' - a key theme in the first half of the novel - and the relationship between her domestic work tidying the rooms of her house, and her act of translation of a poem already frequently translated: The task of translation itself, however, does not feel unfamiliar to me, not only due to translating my own poems, but because the process feels so close to homemaking. In Italian, the word stanza means ‘room’. If there are times when I feel ill-equipped and daunted by the expertise of those who have walked these rooms before me, I reassure myself that I am simply homemaking, and this thought steadies me, because tending to a room is a form of labour I know that I can attempt as well as anyone."

In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself."There is, for example, the recurring themes of rooms – including how the narrator links it (via the Italian stanza) to the construction of a poem; on the concepts of desire; of how women in Irish history are in the “masculine shadow … only of interest as a satellite to male lives” This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. Starlings reappear – their ability to incorporate sounds into their song (as per my opening quote) conveying something of how the keen was first passed down verbally, of the author’s poem and of this novel. An invitation to get quiet, very quiet, and listen to the voices of the past as they beat furiously like a heart in the midst of our days. As they flutter like ghosts in all of our throats.

As I started the book though, my mind went to a more prosaic work, Searching for Tamsen Donner. It’s nonfiction and memoir, as is A Ghost in the Throat. Both are not just about the obsessive physical and mental journeys for details about a woman from the past, but just as much about motherhood in the present. is definitely the year I read a lot of novels about motherhood but Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut takes it to new territories.Where it fell short for me was in the dogged pursuit of a vague historical personage, Eibhlín Dubh, and the search for a worthy English translation of the mournful Irish elegy attributed to her. I gradually lost interest in both these narrative threads. I cared about the book's author but not her personal obsession. I would gladly read more from Ní Ghríofa in the future, though, especially her own poetry. I don’t know enough about Doireann Ní Ghríofa to know whether a large part of this book is autobiography or auto fiction. Either way, our narrator is a woman who is both a mother and a poet. She tells us how she became obsessed with the 18th century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, author of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire which has sometimes been described as the greatest poem written in Ireland or Britain during that century. As she wears herself out balancing motherhood and her obsession, she comes to realise something about Eibhlín Dubh: It is beautifully coherent and audacious, a feat normally given to scholars occupying dusty rooms in closed towers, firstly that the Caoineadh made it into print and endures, despite being the work of a woman; most who lived in the 1700’s, the 1800’s and even the early 1900’s have long since slipped into silence and out of print and secondly that Doireann Ní Ghríofa managed to pursue her research passion while pregnancy, motherhood and house-wifery claimed most of her hours.