Tell us about your new poetry collection, Hymn to All the Restless Girls, “poems of empathy for the ‘girls in trouble, sinful girls, the fallen’ and emigrants forced to leave” in which you “trace the personal in public tragedies”.
Hymn to All the Restless Girls celebrates the girl who is known sometimes in Ireland as a rebel, a truth-speaker and, necessarily, a troublemaker. I drew inspiration from figures like Bridget Cleary, Sinéad O’Connor and Annie Murphy.
I also looked to women like my Donegal grandmother, Mary Thaidhg, who had endless grit and imagination, and who gave me a great love of béaloideas, pisreóga and leigheasanna. The poems are powered by a streak of wild horses, ravens and wolves.
How vital is it for you to write the female experience?
RM Block
I’ve never set out to deliberately centre female experience but that is what tends to come up out of the plumb line. I was a 1980s child who grew up in a family that, like many other families, had a tangled history with the Catholic Church. I had an early exposure to the hurt caused by the Irish mother and baby homes and that had a tremendous impact on me as a young girl.
There is a long tradition in Ireland of the poet as troublemaker.
Yes, indeed. Historically, the Irish poet has occupied different roles, including that of seer, petitioner, critic, satirist. The white feather cloak of the early Irish filid symbolised the poet’s connection to the otherworld and an ability to trouble the border between one reality and another.
You draw inspiration from Gaelic folklore, rituals and ceremonies. Tell us about the ancient art of fiachairecht, the practice of looking to ravens for omens and prophecy.
I first came across a reference to fiachairecht (translated here as “raven-watching”) in the journal Ériu. The associated article suggests that our ancestors had ways of decoding raven activity. If the raven calls “from the northeast end of the house, robbers are about to steal the horses. If it call from the house door, strangers or soldiers are coming. If it go with thee on a journey or in front of thee, and if it be joyful”.
I became enchanted by this idea that ravens, ever-watchful, are carrying a knowledge that humans need.
You are UCD Writer in Residence. How important are archives to your work?
Much of this collection took shape among the archives of the UCD National Folklore Collection. It’s a completely magical place, a kind of portal through to an otherworld. The gaps in archives can be hugely illuminating.
How has the book been shaped by your collaboration with composer Michael Gallen on the libretto for The Curing Line (Straymaker), which won the €100,000 Fedora Opera Prize?
Our adventures together in libretto and documentary-making have nourished in my poetry a sharper sense of the musicality of words, a confidence to take risks, and a deepened desire to celebrate native traditions. Most recently we’ve been interviewing people who are the inheritors of indigenous folk cures. All of that is fuel and grist for the poems.
What of writing between linguistic influences; how poetry can perform; and the power of the collective and of collaboration?
The Irish language has gifted me a way of orientating myself in the world according to place and community. That orientation informs every strand of my practice. It has instilled in me a belief that poetry is rarely written in isolation. Over and over again I’ve discovered that my Gaeltacht roots connect me to ways of being that run across borders and cultures.
It’s your third collection after Bloodroot (2017) and The Poison Glen (2021). How has your poetry evolved in theme and style? Are there common threads in confronting Church and State?
Each poetry book has shifted my perspective of church and state. That’s the gift of poetry – it lives outside linear time. The more you write forward, the more you shape your past. Hymn to All the Restless Girls is songful, magic-filled and it has a new feeling for spirituality and transformation. Some poems reflect on the moving statues and apparitions of 1985 and on the testimonies of those teenage girls. How exactly did that phenomenon take hold? What in us hungers for mystery? Those questions are also a confrontation.
How influential are your roots in Donegal?
My Donegal roots feed all of my creative projects, including this new collection. In fact, there’s a deep respect embedded into Gaeltacht culture for troublemaker figures. I’m thinking of the cailleach waving her hammer, or the banshee, or the bean feasa with her herbs. These figures live in our psyche as magic-makers and guides, connecting us to the land, the spirit world and each other.
As poetry editor of the Stinging Fly, what do you look for?
I look for the poem or poetry voice that keeps on flowering in my imagination long after everything else has fallen away.
You’ve been in Brooklyn at the Hawthornden Foundation. What are you working on?
I’m exploring connections with Indigenous poets from around the United States and trying to understand the gifts and challenges of working with native languages and traditions.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I spent three months at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando (an amusing address, considering it was Jack’s mother, Gabrielle, who probably paid most of the bills!).
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Keep writing until something you did not know was inside of you spills out on to the page.
Who do you admire the most?
I admire the generation of women writers and poets who came before me. They had to make enormous sacrifices and push through walls.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d enshrine the rights of nature into Bunreacht na hÉireann. It’s already been done in other countries like Ecuador.
Which current book, film, podcast would you recommend?
The Bridge of Tears, a limited-edition letterpress book by Ellen Martin-Friel, will be launched at the United Arts Club on December 17th. I was delighted to write five poems for this special project.
Song of Granite by Pat Collins is not a recent film but it remains timeless. Also, any film by Margo Harkin or Sinéad O’Shea.
Bluiríní Béaloidis, the podcast of the National Folklore Collection at UCD, is packed with wondrous audio.
Which public event affected you most?
I remember being flabbergasted on the day that Mary Robinson took office as the first female president of Ireland in 1990.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
I’ve not yet discovered a place on earth quite like Dursey Island on the Beara Peninsula in the west of Cork. Inhabited by a handful of people only, you take a cable-car on to the island. I spent a glorious month there as part of a residency with Creative Places, Cork.
Your most treasured possession?
My godmother has gifted me her lace wedding dress. My intention is to bring it to a dressmaker and have it refashioned into a funky skirt but I am too sentimental to take it apart just yet.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
I own several exquisite letterpress books by Jamie Murphy of The Salvage Press. Most recently we worked together on (S)worn State(s) – a collaborative project with my sister-poets Dimitra Xidous and Kimberly Campanello.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
I’d love to gather around a table with Peig Sayers, Constance Markievicz, Maud Gonne and Lady Augusta Gregory for some whiskey and cards.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I spend as much time as possible at home in Donegal where I’m renovating an old Irish college in Loch na nDeorán, Annagry. The best thing about where I live is the connection to oral storytelling, folklore and the Irish language. The worst thing is the astonishing lack of investment by government in the Gaeltacht community.
What is your favourite quotation?
Biddy Jenkinson once described the poet as “a troublemaker by profession ... She must be independent to the point of eccentricity and is often, though not necessarily, as cursed as a crow-trodden hen and as off as one of the triple-faced monsters with which the Celts depicted Ogma the omniscient, gazing in all directions at once.”
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Baba Brennan from Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls exploded into my life when I was a teenager and she’s been camping out in my imagination since.
A book to make me laugh?
Is there an Irish book more absurd, hilarious and darkly brilliant than Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman?
A book that might move me to tears?
Caelainn Hogan’s Republic of Shame is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Ireland punished “fallen women” and their children. A fascinating and disturbing book.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin is 2025 Arts Council/UCD Writer in Residence. Her third collection of poetry, Hymn to All the Restless Girls, is available to order from gallerypress.com
