The Art of Nuance: Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Annemarie Ní Churreáin

Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s work has been commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in an experimental programme that aims to support different kinds of writing about art. For this programme, we commission a writer each year to write short texts - taking their own tack, fiction, poetry, or otherwise - in response to the five gallery exhibitions that take place over the course of a year. The writings are published on our website and available in our Gallery. In 2019, Annemarie Ní Churreáin was our commissioned writer and Doireann Ní Ghríofa was commissioned in 2018.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Annemarie Ní Churreáin are two outstanding poets, acclaimed as part of a new generation of immensely talented Irish writers, gaining international recognition - pushing boundaries in contemporary poetry and experimental fiction. At this reading Ní Ghríofa and Ní Churreáin will read from a selection of their poems and experimental texts written in response to the gallery exhibitions, as well as from their published and current writing. The evening will include an introductory conversation with Susan Tomaselli who will discuss the themes in their work, their writing process and how they engaged with the TBG+S Writing Commission.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin was immediately recognised as a distinctive voice for literature on the publication of her debut collection Bloodroot (2018). Thomas McCarthy (poet) praises her ‘mature sense of the lyric form and a rare sense of lyric completion, rooted in the bloodroot of women’s history.” Her poems give voice to those who have been silenced or shut away; Ann Lovett, Joanne Hayes, her grandmother who survived a mother and baby home. Rooted in landscape, place, song and the spectre of a patriarchal state, her poetry can read as protest that resonates with the urgencies to break historical silences. Danielle Chapman (The Yale Times), speaks of the atmosphere of hiddenness and the possibility for revelation that provide the electricity in her poems. ‘Ní Churreáin, she writes, ‘slices into the profoundly layered complexity of image with clear lines of powerfully compressed feeling’.

When awarding Doireann Ní Ghríofa the Rooney Prize for Poetry, the Ireland Professor of Poetry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin remarked, ‘she is a poet to watch with a fresh view of the world: apparently ordinary houses, shops, common objects and activities. The sureness of her touch and the skill with which she handles language and shapes her poems are almost invisible, but it is through them that she achieves the feat of making us look again at the usual and illuminates its pulsating strangeness.’ Doireann Ní Ghríofa is remarkable also because she maintains a poetic practice in both Irish and English in poetry and prose and she frequently participates in cross-disciplinary collaborations fusing poetry with film, dance, music and visual. Writing on her first collection in English, Clasp (Daedalus, 2015), Cliona Ni Riordain, writes, ‘Ní Ghríofa raids the myth-kitty of both Irish and Greek mythology, weaving images of violence that combine the ancient and the modern in a poetry that is tense and tactile…The woman’s body is central to the collection, highlighted, visible, unconquered.’