Hymn to All the Restless Girls

by Annemarie Ní Churreáin

In Hymn to All the Restless Girls Annemarie Ní Churreáin continues to trace the personal in public tragedies and to transmute them into fiercely dramatic poetry. Celebrating the rebel spirit of the restless girl, sometimes known as a troublemaker but valued as a truth-teller, she offers prayers of defiance, sacraments of identification, howls of protest and lyric flights. Poems with the force of charms cast their gaze in all directions as they castigate the history of the Irish State (the ‘Free’ State) and the Catholic Church and find ways to thrive beyond cruel experience. Folklore, including superstitions, Irish words and the atmosphere of rural life imbue poems of empathy for the ‘girls in trouble, sinful girls, the fallen’ and emigrants forced to leave. Taking bearings from the ancient art of fiachairecht, the practice of looking to ravens for omens and prophecy, this is a handbook of care and healing and, ultimately, reclamation.

Hymn to All the Restless Girls is Annemarie Ní Churreáin's second collection published by The Gallery Press.

80 pages, Paperback

Published November 6, 2025

About the author

ANNEMARIE NÍ CHURREÁIN is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland and for the 2018 Julie Suk Award in the U.S.A. Her publication history includes Poetry Ireland Review, The SHOp, The London Magazine, Agenda Poetry Journal and The Stinging Fly. Ní Churreáin has been awarded literary fellowships by Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany, The Jack Kerouac House of Orlando and Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She is a recipient of the Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council and a co-recipient—alongside poets Kimberly Campanello and Dimitra Xidous—of the inaugural Markievicz Award. Ní Churreáin is a member of the Writers In Prisons Panel co-funded by the Arts Council & the Department of Justice, Equality and Reform. In 2020, Ní Churreáin was an Artist-in-Residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris. BLOODROOT is her debut collection.

Reviews

[Andrew Verlaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having previously read the impressive collection "The Poison Glen", I was looking forward to this latest collection from Annemarie Ní Churreáin. As the blurb puts it, she "continues to trace the personal in public tragedies and to transmute them into fiercely dramatic poetry".

Nature is juxtaposed with the almost Mordor-like monolith of Church and State in the earlier/earlyish days of the modern Irish nation, though nature is itself often red in tooth and claw. As a suburban kid, I did feel a little underqualified to fully grapple with some of the many references to the flora and fauna in this book.

Though Ní Churreáin has (I hope) many years ahead in her career, she already has an assured voice. (Pieces such as a poem in the form of a school roll call have an outright swagger). Many of these poems hit first time; in a collection that deals with the Magdalene laundries, the title "The home for unmarried fathers" speaks for itself, as does its closing line "because who would wish that penance on anyone?" At the same time, there is depth for revisiting. One of the more interesting voices in Irish poetry right now.