Sarah Connell’s Reviews > A Ghost in the Throat > Status Update

“I love the garden and the garden loves me, but it isn't mine, not really. I will always share it with the woman who began it, who arrived in a sun-dress to a newly built council house and cared for this garden all her life. I don't know where she is now, but her bulbs are buried here. The first morning I walked through her garden, her daffodils' buttery hellos were easily translated: they nodded. I nodded back.”

Getting bogged down a bit now.

“Fast, I clapped my hands, and fast, fast, I galloped, fast as ever I could have, until I found you before me, murdered… with no Pope, no bishop,
no clergy, no holy man to read your death-psalms, only a crumpled old hag who'd draped you in her shawl-rag.
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades, and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.”

“In writing their lives from this distance…in recounting this horror I must inflict it all over again. I wish I could stop the pain this telling will soon cast over Eibhlín Dubh, but I can't. The past never ends. Or, worse, the past tells us how it ends. Over, it says, over and over again.”

“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 all those blunt, brief sketches presenting this woman in the thin roles of aunt and wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women she knew instead?”

“the element I cherish most of all in Eibhlín Dubh's work does not lie in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over. 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 onwards to breathe elsewhere.”

“No poem arrived in praise of the man who slept next to me as I wrote, the man whose moonlit skin always drew my lips towards him. The love I held for him felt too vast to pour into the neat vessel of a poem. I couldn't put it into words. I still can't. As he dreamt I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark.”