Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year

by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Overview

The author of Thin Places reflects on the isolation she experienced after moving into a secluded Irish cottage just before the 2020 global pandemic.

"Ní Dochartaigh's reflections during this time are powerful and poignant, examining themes of motherhood, death, and time. As she grapples with depression, sobriety, and fertility, ní Dochartaigh parallels the social turbulence and pandemic chaos with the majesty of nature . . . Personal, relatable, and restorative, Cacophony of Bone voices a crucial plea to have faith in humanity." —Booklist

Two days after the winter solstice, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived, and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways, everything was forever changed. Mapping the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—Kerri tells the story of a changed life in a changed world. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical and deeply moving, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, the natural world, and most of all to a love that transformed a life. Guided by a voice that is utterly singular, this book is "raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical" (Katherine May), a meditation on home, the deepening of family, and the connections that sustain us.

"Kerri ní Dochartaigh is nothing less than an alchemist, and Cacophony of Bone is a wondrous book." —Margaret Renkl, author of Graceland, At Last

"An arrestingly poetic, genre-bending meditation on time and place. If the pandemic made one thing clear, it's that time is shimmering and slippery, a shapeshifter. It moves the way Kerri ní Dochartaigh's brilliant mind moves, like a fast, deep river. I am as thrilled by the artistry of her sentences as I am by the wisdom they carry in their current. Cacophony of Bone will live on my bookshelf beside Thin Places, one of my favorite books of the past several years. I know I'll reach for them both again and again." —Maggie Smith, New York Times–bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317827
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	12/27/2024
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	293
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Kerri ní Dochartaigh's first book, Thin Places, was published in Spring 2022 in the US. It was an Indies Introduce selection for Winter/Spring 2022, an Indie Next selection for April 2022, and A Junior Library Guild selection for Spring 2022. Cacophony of Bone is her second book. She lives in the west of Ireland with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

 

 

I am telling you here of a year that was like no other.

I am telling you here of a year that was just the same as every other that had ever gone before. 

 

                                                             *******

 

 

 

Two days after winter solstice in 2019 I journeyed across an invisible border, from the North of Ireland to the South – to a small stone railway cottage – on a ghost line cutting through the heart of Ireland.

Moving – flitting from place to place like a migratory bird – is all I’ve known. I’ve averaged a house per year for each one I’ve spent on the earth, and then, suddenly – somehow – I found myself sowing seeds in the earth, painting a front door yellow – feathering a safe nest, for the very first time.

 

What does it mean to stay put? 

 

                                                    ******

The only full year I spent in that cottage, a handful of kilometres from the statue of the Virgin at Granard, the outside world changed shape and colour entirely.

We were asked not to leave the island of Ireland for the whole year.

For most of that year we were held within the same landlocked county.

For some of it we were locked down to within 2 kilometres of our single-roomed, isolated home.

 

                                                                    ****

 

 

But maybe the events of that year really started with finding the nests.

 

When I began to brood, not over a clutch but over time.

 

When I began to try to sculpt it, day by day, alone, wandering, again and again, without scale or horizon, the same field, the same lane, the same stretch of wet, hungry land. When I stepped, in a way, outside & inside, above & below – the flow of it all, the flow of my own blood; enough to really let those objects come. To notice those things and to hold them, give my furry body over to their coming, to stop hurrying through life like a person shamed, by my female body and its traumas, by my past, by what that body could not have, what its parts could not produce. The objects, when they came, swept me with them in their flow, and rattled my bones.

 

Creamy-white dove eggs, opened but unbroken; the skull of a badger, too sculpted to even seem real; on Mother’s Day, (my heart cracked open like a dry seed-head), a perfect, otherworldly antler, from the field’s exact middle; I took, I took, I took.

Bone after bone, porcelain white and willowy: sheep and deer, horse and fox – the pelvic girdle of a delicately bird-like rat – objects so creaturely as to make the longing that had grown inside me slowly, quietly, ease.

There were birds, that year, so many of them as to seem unthinkable.

There was a wren, always a wren; that year was the year of the wren.

                                                                 *****

 

And you see, it really happened in this way, and I really can tell it to you no other way than this. At the bottom of that laneway, objects came from everywhere, ordinary and flawed, on days when time and place no longer knew the way, and I took them.

 

I took every single thing into my arms and hands and home, that year; I was compliant.

 

I knew at every turn I could not go back to how I lived before the objects came. They were an invitation I could do nothing but accept. 

 

Time did the things it does when we aren’t looking, and soon my lover began, while walking on his own, to find things, too. Things, you understand, that never once had come his way before that year. His nests were, to my eye, more gorgeous than my own, but I felt no jealousy. It was such sweet relief to speak of those objects, of what I saw them as taking the place of, somehow. We sat, each night, as the names of those we’d lost were read aloud and we mourned for those we did not know, behind the daily count; faces we had not seen but could not turn away from now. A silence took up residence; it lay in circular objects, things we knew had once been crafted by the careful, repeated movements of the bodies of birds.

 

You lost, too.

You grieved.

You wondered when it all might end; if ever.

 

The grief, the one I went there first to bury, still came in waves, as we all have known it to; the deep water that none of us will ever fully swim through. It paled though, so incredibly, in the face of the sorrow of those days. I held it to the sky and watched it fade. I saw its steely greys and charcoals water down. I watched the ache for what I did not have turn chalky, I stood and let the fledglings drink its milk. It sounds formulaic, as though I forced it in some way, but that year came to me like a field of bleached white bones.

 

I can’t go back to who I was before that year.

 

That time was like no other, all of us thought – but we knew it was exactly like any other, too. The swallows arrived at my new home, found safe sanctuary, and built their nests.

They arrived with you, too, if they had in other summers, just like before.

You stood and watched them fill the sky like a song.

You laughed.

You cried.

You noticed them.

You didn’t.

The longest day came, as always it does – and the shortest came, too – in turn.

 

I am trying to tell you about time.

 

That oddly boned creature, how it shapeshifts, right before our eyes.

How we cannot stop or change it, how it slows down, or moves so fast we cannot keep a hold of it; no matter how we might long to, no matter how firm our grasp.

 

I am trying to tell myself about time, rather.

 

                                                       *******

 

I found out I was pregnant in the second week of August 2020, in the second season of a global pandemic, in the first summer in my new home, as night fell in my first garden.

Everywhere was still and warm.

Moths fluttered above our heads, pulled towards the lights that had only just gone on in our small, quiet stone cottage.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Cacophony of Bone 

“Raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life.”—Katherine May, bestselling author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone is an arrestingly poetic, genre-bending meditation on time and place. If the pandemic made one thing clear, it’s that time is shimmering and slippery, a shapeshifter. It moves the way Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s brilliant mind moves, like a fast, deep river. I am as thrilled by the artistry of her sentences as I am by the wisdom they carry in their current. Cacophony of Bone will live on my bookshelf beside Thin Places, one of my favorite books of the past several years. I know I’ll reach for them both again and again.”—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“A hypnotic book, at once bare and dense with the stuff of life: bolted lettuce, a cup of tea gifted at the end of a rainy day, always the bright, still world returning. At its heart there sits a human creature, a woman writer wrestling her awareness to attention again and again. A sacred book, for turning outward and inward at the same time.”—Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“In a time of isolation, Kerri ní Dochartaigh made a place of belonging. In a season of sickness, she became a vessel for unlooked-for life. In a year of burgeoning fear and rising fury, she tilled her grief into dark soil and brought forth a blooming garden. Kerri ní Dochartaigh is nothing less than an alchemist, and Cacophony of Bone is a wondrous book.”—Margaret Renkl, author of Graceland, At Last

“In poems and essays, Ni Dochartaigh writes in exquisite detail of the seasons, beginning with the “ghost-trace, moon-white” and silent winter that kicks off a new phase of life.”—Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

“Ni Dochartaigh’s chapters are lyrical and deliberately slow, the time allowed its dignified procession without literary tricks. ‘I can’t go back to who I was before that year,’ the author writes, and readers who follow her also will be changed.”—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

“Ní Dochartaigh’s reflections during this time are powerful and poignant, examining themes of motherhood, death, and time. As she grapples with depression, sobriety, and fertility, ní Dochartaigh parallels the social turbulence and pandemic chaos with the majesty of nature. Unyielding storms, precious birds, and beautifulplants offer a sense of peace to a broken world. Readers are reminded to “remember the light,” with notes of gratitude and optimism weaved throughout, along with many nods to the healing power of literature. Personal, relatable, and restorative, Cacophony of Bone voices a crucial plea to have faith in humanity.”—Grace Rosen, Booklist

“The author’s day-book follow-up to her acclaimed debut, Thin Places . [. . .] ní Dochartaigh’s observations are lyrical and relatable. [. . .] A raw, honest, and poetic memoir."—Kirkus Reviews

“Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s luminous first book was called Thin Places; in Cacophony of Bone she makes a study of the thickening that can happen as we dwell, garden, survive, and root. Mapping one extraordinary year of pandemic enclosure—from January to solstice—she charts moonlight, swim, seedpod, and sprouting, also giving us a record of how the steadiness of a writing practice can become a binding, can scaffold us into more steadiness in our own lives. For those that wonder what it might be like to make a craft of bearing witness, ní Dochartaigh’s book is a reminder to live with gratitude and curiosity, and to face each day with heart and notebook open.”—Tess Taylor, author of Leaning Toward Light

“Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a singular writer, and Cacophony of Bone is a stunning work that bristles with light. There isn’t a sentence in this marvelous daybook that doesn’t awaken in the reader a deeper sense of wonder, reverence, and—despite all—belonging.”—Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch

“Reading Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone is like stepping inside the place where poetry comes from. In these pages objects, time, form, memory, grief, politics, sensuality, and change meet. It’s a conversation, a prayer, an address, and an answer. I found myself talking with her as I read.”—Pádraig Ó Tuama, author of Poetry Unbound

From the Publisher

2023-07-26
The author’s day-book follow-up to her acclaimed debut, Thin Places.

In her latest memoir, Irish writer ní Dochartaigh reflects on 2020, which she spent in isolation with her partner in a small stone cottage that he had inherited two years prior. Coupled with the tumult of the pandemic was the uncertainty that the author would ever be able to bear a child. She chronicles her thoughts and feelings from that year in various forms, including journal entries and poems. At times overly fragmented, the narrative expresses the author’s strong emotions and often-obsessive thoughts about her inability to carry a pregnancy to term. “I cried and cried and cried because of grief,” she writes. “Grief I have already spent far too much time, energy and ink on.” On the whole, ní Dochartaigh’s observations are lyrical and relatable. She describes how she took up gardening, which provided both distraction and comfort. “I wish I’d known, long before now, that sowing is a way to grieve,” she writes. Throughout, ní Dochartaigh shares details of various dreams and her attempts to interpret them, including a recurring one of a “bird-child,” which brought about a shift in her mindset. She also found herself consumed with memories and the meaning they hold in our lives, and she expresses being drawn to moths and “the resilience of small things.” A voracious reader, ní Dochartaigh discusses works of literature that served as important companions and helped her navigate her emotions. I have found myself, in the thick of a global pandemic, utterly obsessed with Virginia Woolf,” she writes. “More specifically: with her journals….Even more specifically, still: I am hungry for accounts of time experienced by women.” Reflecting on the changes that the year brought for her and all of us, she notes, “I can’t go back to who I was before that year.”

A raw, honest, and poetic memoir.

Kirkus Reviews