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<\/a><\/p>\nRavens feature prominently in Hymn to All the Restless Girls<\/a>, N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in\u2019s third poetry collection. N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in\u2019s ravens are both storytellers and a mode of attention. They insist on interruption and resistance. Perhaps they are guides for the titular restless girls who, it turns out, are our key to the history of women that the Irish Free State and the Catholic Church tried to bury.<\/p>\n To reinstate the histories excluded from official archives, Hymn to All the Restless Girls draws on Irish language, folklore, and physicalized speech such as lamentation and caoineadh (keening). N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in is playful in form, extruding songs, mythologies, and even curses through formats like constitutional text, institutional procedure, and prayers. Poems such as \u201cArchive 41.2\u201d and \u201cThe Home for Unmarried Fathers\u201d borrow structures and invert subjects to write against the official languages that have governed Irish women\u2019s bodies, labor, and silence. The poems document the historical brutality against women and the absurdity of the mother-and-baby homes. The result is a collection that reframes the restless girls not as moral failures but as bearers of knowledge that might otherwise be lost.<\/p>\n One such type of knowledge is the fiachairecht, the ancient Celtic art of raven-watching, which N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in gamely wandered into while writing Restless Girls. Or did the ravens lead her there? From Odin\u2019s Huginn and Muninn, said to be memory and knowledge, to Lewis Carroll\u2019s perennial riddler, ravens have a long literary history. They\u2019re messengers, witnesses, perhaps tasked with remembering what cannot be neatly concluded. If the relentless \u201cnevermore\u201d of Poe\u2019s raven forecloses the possibility of Lenore, N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in\u2019s ravens resurrect Ireland\u2019s restless girls, insisting they will not be nameless for evermore.<\/p>\n Lucie Shelly: I\u2019d love to begin with the animating idea in the title: restlessness. In Hymn to All the Restless Girls, restlessness takes many forms. Anger, lust, mischief, defiance, even glee. I found myself wondering, is \u201crestlessness\u201d in girls and women innate, or is it what manifests when some force or energy is suppressed? What does restlessness mean for you in relation to poetry?<\/p>\n Annemarie N\u00ed Churre\u00e1in: I love that you\u2019ve mentioned glee because for me there is a lot of joyful energy and seeking in this book as well as anger, frustration, and outrage. Perhaps this restlessness comes out of a quest for transformation. In the Irish mythic tradition, restlessness often signals a person who is on a sacred journey. The poets and warriors of our oldest stories are rarely at peace.<\/p>\n I also think that to be restless is to belong to more than one world. That\u2019s something that Irish people understand very intimately, living as we often do between languages, traditions, and cultures around the globe. And maybe it\u2019s something that women understand especially well. We haven\u2019t always had the luxury of stillness as a pose for achieving self-knowledge, wisdom, or change. It hasn\u2019t always been safe for women to be still. In a patriarchy, sometimes you have to be on the run, you have to be able to move fast.<\/p>\n LS: Poems like \u201cHail Queen of Heaven,\u201d \u201cNight Prayer at the Temple,\u201d and many others invoke rituals or ritualistic language. There\u2019s keening, charms, rites. Do you think of physicalized language\u2014ritual speech, lamentation\u2014as a way of recording suffering or remaking it into something powerful? Or something else entirely?<\/p>\n ANC: I really believe there is magic at play when we give breath to poetry. Audre Lorde, in her essay \u201cPoetry is Not A Luxury,\u201d writes of the illumination that occurs when we work with language as a tool for transformation. We all know that experience of manifesting change in your life by speaking it aloud. And certainly, there\u2019s something [of that power] in poetry. Paula Meehan has spoken about how, in prison, two lines of poetry can save a life. Joy Harjo has written about the power of poetry to change the past. She articulated it so beautifully, I won\u2019t paraphrase, but it\u2019s this idea that poetry operates outside linear time. By the very act of writing or speaking poetry, you\u2019re stepping into a dreamworld where you can transfigure even the past or the future. Yes, definitely\u2014it\u2019s about much more than recording history or suffering. It\u2019s an invitation, also a portal.<\/p>\n LS: My feeling while reading was that not only did the poems move through historical time, they moved through worlds\u2014the mythological world and the \u201creal\u201d world. We enter \u201cthe Donegal County Archives,\u201d we even go into a Woodies Homeware store, but we also encounter these Gaelic mythological figures, Medbh, Gr\u00e1inne Mhaol, banshees, omens. The blend made it feel, for me, like the mythic was reinstating the private, unseen female experience as historical.<\/p>\n To be restless is to belong to more than one world.<\/p>\n ANC: I\u2019m interested in the worldview that is made possible through the Irish language, and about the land as a veil between this world and the Otherworld. Certainly, in the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland, where the Irish language is still spoken and folkloric traditions are very much alive, there\u2019s wild respect embedded into the culture for powerful and restless female figures.<\/p>\n When you grow up with the banshee, the Cailleach, the bean feasa, or historical women like Gr\u00e1inne Mhaol as part of your frame of reference, it gives you a place to retreat to when you have the Irish State and church and all of the awful legacies and internalised shame of a colonised country bearing down on you. I\u2019ve always had somewhere imaginative to retreat to, and that is one of the gifts of having an ancient language or of being connected to indigenous stories. These figures live in the psyche as magic-makers, guides and connectors to land, the spirit world, and each other.<\/p>\n LS: For readers outside Ireland, and even those within, could you describe what it looked and felt like to grow up in a Gaeltacht region?<\/p>\n ANC: I grew up in the Gaeltacht community of northwest Donegal, and Irish was my first language. But a Gaeltacht is more than simply a place where the native language is spoken every day. It\u2019s a worldview rooted in a special instinct for place, magic, and relationships. For example, the relationship between people and place, or that relationship between the spheres of the physical and the metaphysical. It\u2019s a way of understanding that as humans, we live \u2018ar sc\u00e1th a ch\u00e9ile.\u2019 Cree scholar Dwayne Donald describes colonialism as \u201con-going process of relationship denial,\u201d and to grow up in a Gaeltacht is to grow up immersed in the parts of Irish culture that could not be denied or destroyed.<\/p>\n I came of age in the 1980s, when teenage girls in rural Ireland were having apparitions of the Virgin Mary\u2014the moving statues. Later, I felt a little embarrassed about that phenomenon. I remember being at university in Dublin and looking back on the footage of thousands of people gathering to see these \u201cmagical presences\u201d in the landscape, and feeling: Wow, we\u2019re the subject of ridicule. Now, I can look back on that really differently. It was a folklore living in the culture, it was being torn between these two worlds. This hunger for mystery was so in the consciousness, and still popular to that degree, in 1985! It\u2019s kind of incredible. In 1985 teenage girls and young women were being brutalized by church and state. They were living through the end of the theocracy. They were often not in control of their narratives or destinies, but three teenage girls went out one night in Sligo, and they ended up positioning themselves right at the centre of a hugely exciting public story. There\u2019s a delicious power in all of that.<\/p>\n Maybe I took it [the Gaeltacht worldview] for granted for a long time. To a certain extent, I spent a lot of years trying to escape Donegal, wanting to explore other ways of living. Asking, well, what else might I be? But with this collection, I discovered a fierce desire to celebrate where I come from. It has shaped every part of my life. It doesn\u2019t matter if I\u2019m editing, or writing opera, or writing poems, that wellspring of Gaeltacht culture feeds everything, especially my poetry.<\/p>\n LS: I\u2019d love if you could talk about some of the spiritual and mythical motifs that appear in the collection. In particular, I\u2019m interested in fiachairecht, and Caoineadh.<\/p>\n ANC: Well, fiachairecht is the Irish traditional art of watching ravens for prophecy and omens. A powerful songbird, the raven (an fiach dubh), often appears in Irish poetry and features very prominently in our oldest warrior stories. Sometimes, the raven is linked to the [Celtic] Morrigan goddess. And the white raven in particular is an auspicious sign.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re deep in a poem, your subject suddenly appears everywhere. Wherever I was, there seemed to be a raven watching me.<\/p>\n A few years ago, I was walking in Poison Glen in northwest Donegal, and a raven flew gracefully across the full moon, and I became enchanted by what it might be trying to tell me. The image imprinted itself on my mind. I filed it away until, later, looking through old copies of a journal called Eiriu, I came across two texts: one about fiachairecht, the art of raven watching, and one about dreanacht, the art of wren watching.<\/p>\n As is the case in many native cultures there\u2019s a belief in Ireland that certain animals can act as guides, that we can acquire knowledge from creatures. I found a kinship between the raven, its behaviors, and the restless girls. There are so many beautiful beliefs around ravens\u2014some of which I list in \u201cProclamation\u201d and the Raven Chorus poems. These birds led me straight to many of the poems in this book.<\/p>\n LS: Did you have to learn the art and practice of how to watch them?<\/p>\n ANC: I suppose I did. When you\u2019re writing poetry, you\u2019re led down completely unexpected roads. I started naturally to watch ravens over the course of the book, and I made myself alert to their patterns of movement. When you\u2019re deep in a poem, your subject suddenly appears everywhere. Wherever I was, there seemed to be a raven watching me or a raven in a tree trying to tell me something.<\/p>\n According to the old practice, you must track the direction a raven is flying in and listen to the particular sounds it\u2019s making to decode the behaviour. If the raven calls from the northeast end of the house, robbers are about to steal the horses. If it calls from the house door, strangers or soldiers are coming, etc. Traditionally, they\u2019ve been navigators, helping people plan routes and anticipate what the future holds.<\/p>\n Similarly, figures like Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor, and other restless girls who have appeared throughout Irish history, have tried to guide us, though they\u2019ve often been a kind of puzzlement to us. We\u2019ve sometimes looked at them and wondered: What are they trying to tell us? What is their behaviour communicating? A lot of people watched Sin\u00e9ad tear up the image of the Pope and they just didn\u2019t understand what she was trying to say. In a way, I\u2019ve tried to approach the ravens\u2014these curious little creatures that sing so boldly\u2014with that question: What are they drawing my attention to?<\/p>\n \u00a0LS: It\u2019s making me think, what is this restlessness but an attempt to communicate? And the Caoineadh, that\u2019s keening?<\/p>\n ANC: Yes, Caoineadh is a form of lament historically performed by women at wakes or at gravesides. Actually, it\u2019s not unique to Ireland and also exists in many other cultures. The keens were often disturbing, and contained raw, unearthly emotion, spontaneous words, weeping, and elements of song. The keener had the power to make an otherworldly sound that connected her to the metaphysical world. And within that sound, there existed not merely sorrow but sometimes rage too. A keen might, at times, berate the dead person! The keen might stray into comedy. The keening woman embodied and expressed the full, gnarly, and tangled spectrum of gut emotion. That\u2019s something that I was very excited by in this book, the chance to let female figures be with the intensity of their emotions. Although the keening tradition has died out of contemporary life, it\u2019s no wonder that we\u2019ve held fast to the cultural memory of it.<\/p>\n LS: That rage feels in conversation with the current moment. The collection explores how the Catholic Church and Irish State governed women\u2019s bodies, but I read it at a time when reproductive rights and female autonomy are under attack in the U.S. Across pop culture, from Lily Allen to Rosal\u00eda, there\u2019s a renewed interest in the Madonna-whore complex. Many of your poems, like \u201cGospel of the Magdalenes,\u201d \u201cWedding Dress for a Restless Girl,\u201d can be quite sensual even in political or religious moments\u2014there\u2019s a sense of rapture, or rapturous anger. I\u2019m interested in your lens on this contemporary moment. How has Ireland\u2019s past informed Irish women\u2019s relationships with their bodies today?<\/p>\n
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