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.
![creative nonfiction bird migration songbirds](https://clairemcalpine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/handiwork-sara-baume.jpg?w=303)
![Best Non Fiction Read of 2020](https://clairemcalpine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/a-ghost-in-the-throat.jpg?w=303)
![Fifty Four Variations on Voice Refuge](https://clairemcalpine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/when-women-were-birds.jpg?w=306)
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.