Cacophony of Bone

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It was no surprise that she mentions the works of Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sara Baume, it feels 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.

Cacophony of Bone is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – but it is, too, about all that which does not change. All that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language; this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life. Told month by month, in three parts, through diary extracts, poetry, essay and hybrid prose, its form reflects the time, and the place, that helped to mould it." It is hard to describe what lessons Cacophony of Bone imparts. The more I try to articulate what ní Dochartaigh wants to tell us, the less I am able to. Her wisdom is like water — too strong, and too elusive, to be hooked. After reading it now, several times, I think perhaps this is the book’s power — that it fills the needs of the person who stands before it. It is a story of sobriety, or motherhood, or the choice not to become a mother at all. It is a book about grief, or healing, or the joy of birds, or the frustrations of gardening. It is a book about love, or trying to find the time to write. It is about the strength of community even when we are separated by vast space, and about the importance of proximity. It is about the beauty of a discarded bone, and the importance of always carrying a penknife. Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s second book, a tender and luminous chronicle of the first year of the pandemic, explores new life and the meaning of home. Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes.

Ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places which was highly commended by the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021. She has written for the Guardian, Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers and others. ní Dochartaigh writes in evocative, poetic prose that is quietly majestic. A spell and incantation of the best kind of magic; the ordinary, everyday. In diary form she notes both the personal and political. From the small: the changes of light, the flutter of a moths wing, the lighting of a candle. To the big: the injustice of the political and social crises, the grief and trauma of growing up in Ireland, the longing to be a mother, the birthing of hope. Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. Dreams arrive and motifs return, the days are spent reaching for meaning, walking them through, collecting and abandoning them anew.

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.This is transformative writing, true and haunting, but most of all, hopeful. It sings with light and life.’

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This book is not about an easy return to earth, a quiet acquiescence to the routines of building a garden and a home, or the easy joy of settled domesticity. It is shot through with the appeal of these things in places, but ní Dochartaigh is more preoccupied with the strange layering of delight and dread that comes with considering time itself. With losing and gaining time to routine, to a pandemic, to the demands of a life which can only sometimes spare the space for writing. A greenhouse of seedlings is destroyed once, twice, by storms. Broadband is elusive. Work gets missed. Loneliness comes in waves. Storms keep her inside, claustrophobia mounting until she is sure she will ‘take to drumming at the bog, like a snipe.’ However, minor gripes aside, this was a gorgeous look at the changing natural world in the year the human world (the unnatural world) stood still. I could hear about storm light and weather patterns and skylarks all day long. It really was beautifully written. I didn't realise until I was halfway through that I have the author's previous work Thin Places not only on my tbr but in my audiobook library - so I'll bump that up the list. At the beginning of each chapter before the very brief diary entries, which are short poetic fragments and thoughts, there is a text, a navigation of layers of loneliness, grief and gratitude, observations of birds and moths, planning a garden and planting of seeds, the importance of rituals, an appreciation of the companionship of another human being, the connection with amazing women she has never yet met and the incredible comfort to be found in lines of language, of the soothing power of words and 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.