Cacophony of Bone

Product Information

Canongate are the best publishing house around and I am so grateful for their incredible work on Thin Places," she said. "I’m so excited to work with Simon on Cacophony of Bone, a book that takes my writing in a new direction. I hope Cacophony might deliver a little light to any reader that encounters it along the way. I am proud to continue my journey with Canongate and so grateful to everyone that continues to make this possible; it’s a deep joy."

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. Cacophony of Bone is ní Dochartaigh’s record of a year spent in an isolated stone cottage with her partner M in the strangest year in recent history. It is a symphony of memoir, nature journal, diary and musings of that year. All that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh Press Reviews

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. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year – a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life – from one winter, to the next," the synopsis explains. "This is a time like no other, but it is also exactly like any other, too. The longest day came, as always it does – and the shortest came, too – in turn. This book is about time, that oddly boned creature; how it shapeshifts, right before our eyes. The pandemic has altered the way many of us view or experience time, and yet we watch as the natural world continues its unfurling, just as it always has, right outside our doors. It is also a book about home, and what that can mean. Home can be a place, a person, or perhaps even nature. 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." 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.’ In Cacophony of Bone as in her previous work, Kerri has a deeply personal voice that feels as if it comes not from her, but from the earth beneath her' MARC HAMER

Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s ‘Cacophony of Bone’ — a circular ode to a year, a place, and a love that changed a life — is just-published by Canongate. The author’s wisdom is like water, writes Róisín Á Costello. What might it mean to focus on the sowing of seeds of hope in the face of such individual and collective despair? The delight of ní Dochartaigh’s writing is her capacity to measure compassion against observation. She writes with glee and factual appreciation of a ‘pile of fallen branches, a winter pyre of ghost-bark; lichen-limb’ tumbled into the stream that she thinks may be a thin place, before concluding ‘though I beg myself to be done with all of that.’ She describes the potential of the day held in the ‘white-toothed, clenched jaw’ of the morning but also shrugs and asks ‘Who gives a hoot how I spend my mornings.’ In this book, as in ní Dochartaigh’s last, the reader is drawn to her empathy, and her ability to marry it to a shrugging dispassion in a way that shakes the reader from any reverie of reverential self-seriousness. 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.This is transformative writing, true and haunting, but most of all, hopeful. It sings with light and life.’

I am a little in awe of Kerri ni Dochartaigh's work - the clarity and disinhibition of her storytelling; the wild freedom of her prose. Here is a brave and bold book, and one that deserves to be read, then read again' HELEN JUKESIt 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. Time, she sees, does not pass inexorably like sand in a time-glass; moment does not smoothly succeed moment as she has been accustomed to believe. Rather, its motion is fitful and fluttering: “The only way I can put this,” ní Dochartaigh writes, “is to say that time has become erratic, hard to catch – to hold – identify.” What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods. 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. 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.