When I saw that Kerri ní Dochartaigh had a new book out, I was intrigued. I read her debut Thin Places (reviewed here) in 2022, it was a tough read at times, especially as I went into it thinking it might be nature writing akin to others of the genre I’ve read. It was not. It was much darker.
At that time, nature, more than an observation, provided solace to an ever present dread and those thin places were a kind of magical opening and hint of acceptance that kept her here – just. The book trawled through a sombre northern Irish childhood into young adulthood, as the author attempted to rise out of a grasping fog towards finding their place and way in the world. To feel safe, while railing against the after-effects of trauma. From nightmares to numbness, nature was her nurturer.
While that book was challenging because of all it makes the reader feel, Cacophony of Bone was proof of a move forward, of a shift out of the rawness of her earlier existence and while still in the process of healing, clear signs of hope and progress and development. A relationship that comes across as more anchored and a commitment to sobriety. New circumstances that hold promise.
It began two days
after the winter solstice,
as all stories begin:
with light.
Essentially, it is a beautifully sculpted 12 month hybrid journal/memoir with splashes of poetry. It begins just as she is making a move to a one room very basic railway cottage in the middle of Ireland with her partner/lover, a couple of months before the country/world is going into lockdown. It becomes a year of noticing, of planting, growing, of collecting objects, abandoned nests, bone remnants…
To notice those things and to hold them, give my furry body over to their coming, to stop hurrying through life like a person shamed, by my female body and its traumas, by my past, by what that body could not have, what its parts could not produce.
At the beginning of each chapter before the brief, dated, diary entries, which are short poetic fragments and thoughts, there is a longer text that contemplates – a navigation of layers of loneliness, grief and gratitude, observations of birds and moths, planning, planting and harvesting a garden, recognising the importance of rituals, appreciating the constant and reliable companionship of another human being, developing connections with amazing women she has never met (yet) and embracing the comfort to be found in lines of language, the soothing power of words, the immense power and wonder of books.
Ritual finds form through the assumption that it is a means of really knowing something. Religious ceremony and personal rites of passage fill my thoughts. The gently, insistent act of repeating. How it creates equilibrium between the small and the vast, the seen and the unseen, the self and other, the part and the whole. We build myths (which are really just houses). Dwelling places built of the bones left behind by stories. We fill the gaps in the walls with ritual. We insulate it with objects.
Dreams arrive and motifs return, the days are spent reaching for meaning, walking them through, collecting and abandoning them anew.
I don’t think I have ever read a book that made me stop so often to look up references to predominantly works of creative nonfiction, poetry and memoir. It was a year of isolation, but Kerri ní Dochartaigh was able to read (and reread) from a bountiful collection of stunning literature. I admit to placing two orders with my new favourite Kenny.ie independent bookshop during the week I read the book.
It was no surprise to see mentioned the works of Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sara Baume, it felt like these women hail from a similar soul group, literary sirens whose words lure readers not to their deaths, but to their visions and streams of conscious thought.
I find myself searching for the words of others as a means to fill the holes that the actions of (other) others have left in me.
We encounter throughout the pages Alice Oswald, Tove Jannsson, Moya Cannon, Annemarie Ni Churreain, Annie Ernaux, Terry Tempest Williams, Karine Polwart, Sarah Gillespie, Ellena Savage, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Rebecca May Johnson, Rebecca Solnit, Kathryn Joseph, Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, Anne Lamott, Richelle Kota, Alice Vincent, Lauret Savoy, Rebecca Tamas, Tania Tagaq, Emily Dickinson, Louise Erdrich, Colette Fellous, Sinéad Gleeson, Selva Almada, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Campbell, Elske Rahill, Octavia Bright, Alice Miller, Maggie O’Farrell, Genevieve Dutton and more…
After being alone for a long time, one starts to listen
differently,
to perceive the organic and the unexpected all around,
to brush against all the incomprehensible beauty of the material. Tove Jansson, ‘The Island’
It’s a book that follows the seasons, that reminded me of reading Alice Tucker’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic and Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking, it takes some skill to keep a reader engaged in a form of nature diary, but the blend of personal story, observations of nature, literary references and the curiosity of seeing where the author will end up after the revelations of Thin Places, all made it a compelling read for me, that became increasingly absorbing the further I read.
It’s a heart laid bare, bruised but beating madly with the joy of being alive.
I’m left intrigued and curious about what will come next, although that might be quite obvious, since the end is in effect the dawn of a new beginning. A work in progress.
Highly recommended.
Further Reading
Interview: Writing Between Two Worlds, An Interview with Kerri Ni Dochartaigh
Review: The Guardian Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh review – a survivor’s story
Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Author
Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s first book, Thin Places, was published in Spring 2021, for which she was awarded the Butler Literary Award 2022, and highly commended for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021.
Cacophony of Bone is her second book. She lives in the west of Ireland with her family.
She writes about nature, literature and place for the Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, Caught by the River and others. She has also written for the Guardian, BBC, Winter Papers.
Grand, tells the story of Noelle McCarthy’s growing up in Hollymount, County Cork and the highs and lows of being around a mother, who had already lost two children before she was born and was herself never comforted by her own mother. Seeking to self-regulate through the effect of alcohol, Grand demonstrates numerous effects of having been raised under those circumstances and how a multi-faceted generational trauma passes down.
Noelle McCarthy is an award-winning writer and radio broadcaster. Her story ‘Buck Rabbit’ won the Short Memoir section of the Fish Publishing International Writing competition in 2020 and this memoir Grand won the Best First Book General Nonfiction Award at the NZ Book Awards 2023.
It was the perfect choice for in-flight reading, as the stories were thoroughly entertaining and kept me gripped in between flight delays, air traffic control strikes, and would have kept me company on the Elizabeth Line had I not been engrossed in eavesdropping on a conversation between two captivating young men where they discussed how they create fashion insta stories, the merits of studying in Portugal versus London; a recent concert one of them performed in Cuba last week (as you do) and gossiping about their friend who found love after challenging himself to go on 100 tinder dates – not the kind of conversation one might overhear where I live, thus book aside and ears wide open!
Set in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’, in the mid 1970’s, Trespasses began with what seemed like a chance encounter, when a known barrister, Michael Agnew, a married man of the opposite faith, a Protestant, known to provide legal defence to IRA members; a man who had known Cushla’s father, sat at the bar, while she was serving, engaging her in stilted conversation.
Having just read and loved Edna O’Brien’s trilogy 
Childhood in the west Irish countryside, early adulthood in a boarding house in Dublin, marriage in London; the three books follow the lives of two girls Caithleen (Kate) and Bridget (Baba), who were neighbours, school friends and boarding house room mates. Though they were not girls who had much in common personality wise, they had a shared history; without that connection, their lives might have been much worse.
Caithleen meets Eugene, something about him (half foreign, older man) reminds her of Mr Gentleman, whom she hasn’t seen for two years. The girls now live in Joanna and Gustav’s boarding house and become like family in this house, sometimes confiding in Joanna, who struggles to maintain rules and boundaries with the girls.
Again time passes, so that when we encounter the girls next, they are on the cusp of marriage. Caith (now Kate) will marry the one who abandoned her and Baba, a man who can provide for her in the manner she craves. One desires love, the other security. Sadly, there’s not much in the way of bliss.
Edna O’Brien was born in December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare. She has written over 20 works of fiction.
Factory Girls is a story that takes place over the summer of 1994, while three friends, living in an unnamed northern Irish town, await their exam results and confirmed university placements, and therefore the trajectory of their future lives.
I don’t have any Irish nonfiction left unread on my shelf, but I have noted that creative nonfiction author Kerri ní Dochartaigh, whose debut 
If you are looking for inspiration, check out Cathy’s blog, where she shares a list of 
My first encounter was her nonfiction title Handiwork, one I highly recommend as a starting place to her work and style. This title is like a spring board into her fiction, an introduction to the visual artist, the poet, the keen observer and storyteller.
Baume describes everything about them, about the house, its character, its creaks and groans, its smallest inhabitants, the habits of all those who dwell within its walls, inside its walls, outside its walls in her multiple adjective, poetic prose, that skips across the page to a rhythmic beat.
First we meet the spider that lives behind the wing mirror of their van, who takes refuge behind the glass.
Sara Baume’s debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and has been widely translated. Her second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and her 2020 bestselling non-fiction book, handiwork, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Seven Steeples, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and has just been longlisted for the 
Word by Word 