HEREAFTER

An acclaimed Irish poet imagines a female ancestor's life through a unique blend of research and balladry.

Groarke, who has published eight poetry collections, knew her great-grandmother Ellen O’Hara through the stories her mother told her. The author was intrigued, but it was only during a stay in New York many years later that she seriously began investigating Ellen's life through a combination of archival research and creative channeling. In order to tell the story, she writes, “I will need guardrail prose, but I will also need language that cross-stitches and embroiders itself, the way poetry often does.” The result is a dual-voiced narrative inhabited by a feisty Ellen, who speaks in “the boxy fourteen-line rhyming form” of the folk sonnet, and a questing narrator who speaks in the thoughtful prose of a seeker. The choice to enshrine Ellen’s voice in this way not only emphasizes the imaginative nature of Ellen’s character, but also pays tribute to what Groarke envisions as her ancestor’s traditional nature; it also transforms an otherwise ordinary life into something more consequential. To ground Ellen’s life in history, Groarke interweaves excerpts from studies about Irish immigration and archival documents like baptism registers, passenger manifests, and newspaper clippings and photographs. The author mixes known details about Ellen’s life—her work as a maid in New York; her marriage to a man who deserted her—with intuitive insights into Ellen's hopes and fears. Most of these involved the return of the children she sent back home along with lifesaving remittances to her relatives. She wanted only to build a life in America for her children, but in the process, she and other women like her helped build modern Ireland. As it imagines one woman’s life, this genre-bending book probes the nature of family and belonging and the profound ways ordinary immigrant women changed history on both sides of the Atlantic.

Intelligent, searching, and warmly rendered.