Cacophony of Bone

by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Overview

From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and finding home. 

Two days after the winter solstice in 2019, Kerri 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 2020 was unlike any year we had seen before. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical, fragmentary in subject and form, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that transformed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri’s elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. This is a book for the reader who wants to slow down, guided by a voice that is utterly singular, “rich and strange,” (Robert Macfarlane). A book about home—the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317827
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	881,467
File size:	3 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.
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

Kerri’s voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I’ve folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

“Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part memoir.”―Guardian
“Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written.”―Sunday Times

“Kerri ní Dochartaigh is something of a modern-day mystic, a writer of acute sensitivity and wonder. There is such beauty, such pain, such rawness in this diary of an extraordinary year—you read it feeling quickened, awakened - that you, too, are missing a layer of skin. It’s a very special book indeed.”—Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
“[Kerri] is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place.”—Amy Liptrot, author of The Instant

“Piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers.”—Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees
“Full of wisdom and deeply engaging.”—Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations 

“Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s written form is unique and a wonder—like finding a ‘hag-stone’ on a beach of otherwise everyday solid pebbles—her words are strong and resilient, yet allow light to flow through their very core—igniting hope, grief and allowing us to find connection with the other than human world.”—Jo Sweeting, @thestonecarver

From the Publisher