Hymn to All the Restless Girls
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Annemarie Ní Churreáin
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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How angry we are. And how tired’
— Aoife Lyall on Hymn to All the Restless Girls by Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Annemarie Ní Churreáin chooses every word she uses with clarity, exactitude, and accountability.
Take the title of her latest collection. With Hymn we are given a religious song of praise. All negates specific time periods, generations, or geographies: classifications often used to silence or dismiss uncomfortable truths. Restless is laden with idiomatic connotations: after all, the devil makes work for idle hands. And what Ní Churreáin’s needs us to understand that it is Girls, not women, who are forced to shoulder the weight of the innocence and corruption within. This collection is not a hymn book ‘for’ these restless girls: it is addressed to them: they are ones being sung to; they are the ones being acknowledged, celebrated, and reclaimed here.
The collection is divided into three parts, the first largely composed of poems written in response to the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (2021) which appeared in Ní Churreáin’s most recent pamphlet, Ghostgirl. Here, the Ghostgirls stand at the beginning of a tripartite structure, reaffirming Ní Churreáin’s refusal to let the initial State investigations suffice. This is not the end of the matter.
. . .
Rage and revenge, power and disgust, set against the exhaustion of guilt and blame, pain and suffering: each pair sparking and tempering each other as the Raven Chorus poems rise incrementally to the top of their pages.
In doing this, Ní Churreáin is articulating what it is like for the women of our generation, those of us born while the laundries were still open, those of us who grew up knowing about them, but not understanding them, and yet those whose decisions were all laden with the vehement, insidious understanding that there were no second chances. Fall, and you fall alone. How angry we are. And how tired:
Oh, it’s never-ending! This fire.
The outer daughters burn for the inner daughter.
See how we flicker in our linden coats
as our girl within a girl, the unseen one, spits
in the face of Abasy monsters.
[…]
Wolves, help us nest the bones of our deepest daughter.
(‘For a Restless Girl Who Loved Matryoshka Dolls’)
— Aoife Lyall, Books Ireland Magazine
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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