Quality book from Tramp Press. Highly recommend this lyrical masterpiece. Very unsettling. Written plainly, purply only when gothically appropriate. It’s a literary chiller slash work of historical scholarship. It reminded me of Sara Perry’s Melmoth with a feminist bent.
The book concerns a woman as she undergoes the trials, tribulations and ecstasies of motherhood, during which time she becomes obsessed with a 17th century widowed Gaelic noblewoman who composed a haunting poem cursing the men who murdered her husband in cold blood. This is in reference to a real poem written by the widow of Art O’Laoghaire who, upon finding her lover’s body leaking ichor, scooped up and consumed handfuls of his blood. The author offers her own translation from the Irish, and provides sources for referenced versions. That period, the romantic end of the Gaelic lords and their subsequent harsh subjugation under the Penal laws, is evoked beautifully and made me long for romantic feasts, bold colored leine and sacred bards.
As the author likes to reiterate, it’s a female text about female texts and contains many interesting digressions on that topic. It’s very emotionally moving and raw, I was moved. As a man, I really winced at some of the descriptions of how alien pregnancy is and the strange thoughts and dreams and feelings such a transcendental experience can give rise to. Please give this one a chance, a fantastic contemporary Irish novel.
Alchemisland 
Leave a comment