In 2020, Doireann Ní Ghríofa published her first work of prose, A Ghost in the Throat, to widespread acclaim. Although it was, in part, a study of her own life (as a partner, mother, impecunious poet), it also resurrected a great 18th-century Irish writer, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, using a mixture of fiction and scholarship; Ní Chonaill’s work of ‘keening’ about her husband’s murder, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, had been preserved but her personal history had been allowed to fall into obscurity. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s search ends ‘not in the satisfaction of neat discovery, but in the persistence of mystery’. The past, she comes to accept, will never yield all the answers. It is a hard-won revelation that both wounds and liberates Ní Ghríofa, whose excavation of her subject is at times so intense, so darkly obsessive, that the ‘invisibility’ she claims for herself towards the end of the book feels less like a rhetorical flourish than the acknowledgement of an irreversible dissolution.

Like A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s new book combines the author’s careful research with her formidable imagination. But Said the Dead is an altogether more expansive piece of work. Rather than the ‘I’ of her previous work, Ní Ghríofa adopts for herself the more distant and abstract ‘the