In Hymn to All the Restless Girls Annemarie Ní Churreáin continues to trace the personal in public tragedies and to transmute them into fiercely dramatic poetry. Celebrating the rebel spirit of the restless girl, sometimes known as a troublemaker but valued as a truth-teller, she offers prayers of defiance, sacraments of identification, howls of protest and lyric flights. Poems with the force of charms cast their gaze in all directions as they castigate the history of the Irish State (the ‘Free’ State) and the Catholic Church and find ways to thrive beyond cruel experience. Folklore, including superstitions, Irish words and the atmosphere of rural life imbue poems of empathy for the ‘girls in trouble, sinful girls, the fallen’ and emigrants forced to leave. Taking bearings from the ancient art of fiachairecht, the practice of looking to ravens for omens and prophecy, this is a handbook of care and healing and, ultimately, reclamation.
. . . The cure of breath is given
like a stream of foals passing
through the creaking pines.
— ‘The Handywoman Tends to a Sickly Child’
Hymn to All the Restless Girls is Annemarie Ní Churreáin's second collection published by The Gallery Press.
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Read 'Annemarie Ní Churreáin celebrates the troublemaker' - RTÉ article
Listen to Annemarie Ní Churreáin discussing Hymn to All the Restless Girls on RTÉ Radio One's Arena.
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Awards
Co-winner of the 2026 Michael Hartnett Award
Reviews
Judges’ Comments, Michael Hartnett Award
Annemarie Ni Churreáin continues to stretch her innovative and fertile imagination in her third collection, Hymn to All the Restless Girls, in which she also fashions a completely original idiom that is vigorous in its task of telling us “what the archivesdo not record”. Every poem speaks with a resolute sense of purpose, joyously ripping the veil of concealment and breaking the code of silence established by Church and State around their injustices against the generations of voiceless young women banished to a shadow-world. She wants to open her readers’ eyes and does so with a visceral sharpness that compels our attention.
From cover to cover these poems are acts of solidarity and empathy with those who, as one poem tells it, have been “cast out”. There is nothing chimerical about her “restless girls”, they are heroines of flesh and blood, of what she calls “the dark communions of womanhood”. The sensibility at the heart of this book is both tender and angry, a carefully considered artfulness at work in her telling of home truths, her belief in the potency of the omen. We find ourselves moving in new directions, following the drumbeat of her rhythms, trusting her as a poet of instinct, a weaver of folkloric narratives, a singer of mesmeric incantations.
— Gerard Smyth
A wonderful collection of poems. It reads as the title says, as a ‘Hymn To All The Restless Girls.’ This work is a powerful invocation, at times spellbinding, its primal rhythms drawing the reader into a world both ancient and present. It is steeped in folklore and myth, in the old superstitions, but by dint of this poet’s skill with language it becomes an urgent, necessary book for today. It is as if this poet has sourced and scrutinised her place of power, an archaic power that is deep and dark. I was captivated by these poems that seem to emerge from the earth itself. The voice of the poet transforms language into a resonant sound that weaves through the collection like a pulse and transmutes to a kind of golden hymn to the world.
Patterns of language indicate new ways to reimagine the world. The poet turns a spotlight on established constitutional and patriarchal constraints that have restricted women and girls for millennia. Audre Lorde says, “the visibility that makes us vulnerable is also our strength”
This is a courageous, innovative, beautifully crafted collection. A worthy inheritor of the Michael Hartnett mantle.
— Jo Slade
Book Information
Publication date: 6 November 2025
Details: 80pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 106 3
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91737 107 0
Cover: ‘Ruth’ by Alice Maher, courtesy of the artist
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