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To Star the Dark is the first new collection of poems by Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, following her acclaimed prose bestseller A Ghost in the Throat.
The poems in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s much-anticipated new collection To Star the Dark take place in hospitals, in cellars, in Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them. Poems of blood and birdsong, of rain and desire, of aftermath and ambivalence, each spoken by a voice, which – like the starlings – sings, at once, both past and present.
“Looking into the dark sky of history, Doireann Ní Ghríofa calls up an illuminating fire, a night constellated into images of passion and destruction. An astrologer of the body, its endurance and its vulnerability, Ní Ghríofa is a poet of daring skill. Lyrical, searching, and enchanted, To Star the Dark is a blazing, brave collection.”
— Seán Hewitt
“Like [Eavan] Boland, Ní Ghríofa constructs a mysterious world for her readers from the matter of ordinary life. The poems of this collection impress upon us that magic and depth can be found in the minutiae of the everyday.”
— Poetry Ireland Review, on Lies
About the Author
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. Her most recent book is the bestseller A Ghost in the Throat, which finds the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective. Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity.
Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), the Hartnett Poetry Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others.
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