Clouded Reveries: Doireann Ní Ghríofa review

There is a great deal of Doireann Ní Ghríofa in Ciara NicChormaic’s elegantly composed documentary on the author of the bestselling A Ghost in the Throat. Indeed, there is barely another human in the film. We begin with Ní Ghríofa sounding out the words as she composes her latest work. We see her at rest in the Clare home of her beloved grandmother. She visits Cork where, remembering her time as a dental student, she gazes out from the university at an apparently deserted city.

The strategy works. Few documentaries have done such a good job at teasing out the inner writer, and the lack of distractions only helps that task along. The film shows the evidence of a wider life — toys are cast aide, laundry is folded — but the illusion of being welcomed into Ní Ghríofa’s creative interior remains. It helps that she has such an engaging and eccentric presence. Speaking in Irish throughout, breaking into English only when reading work written in that language, Ní Ghríofa gently and melodically allows the impression to build of a timeless bard. She laughs at her own oddness as she explains that she rebelled as a youth by veering towards dentistry. The process of dissecting a body, described in A Ghost in the Throat, confirmed that we are all formed from series of layers. Oral hygiene’s loss was literature’s gain as, spurred by such revelations, she turned towards poetry and lyrical modes of prose.

So complete is the impression of a spirit lost to time that it comes as a surprise when she reads a poem that details falling home after a night out with “bass still thudding in our veins”. Ní Ghríofa explains, as no reader of poetry needs to be told, that she does not always write as herself, but it is reassuring to hear this connection with modern life.

Clouded Reveries is, perhaps, shorter and narrower than we expect a theatrical feature to be. Its natural home is probably on the smaller screen. But the poet is such a captivating performer of her own work that any screening will seem like an event. There are endless insights worth pondering. Listen to her talking about how she plucks lines from the fuzzy ether as she drifts off to sleep. “If literature is my religion that’s when I pray,” she says.

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