In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain" during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, A Ghost in the Throat moves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.

A female text -- A liquid echo -- To breathe elsewhere -- In the milking parlour -- An unscientific mishmash -- The dissection room -- Cold lips to cold lips -- Oubliette -- Blood in mud -- Two roads, each blurred -- Blot. Blot. -- Omen -- of planes and starlings -- To splinter the surface -- Now, then -- A sequence of shadows -- Wild bees and their fizzy curiosities -- How blurred the furze -- Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire/The keen for /Art Ó Laoghaire.