"I see sketches of islands / half revealed / like deities / in a haze." From Ní Chinnéide’s opening words, Ghost Songs takes the listener through the earthly and the otherworldly, the liminal and the ethereal, and through encounters and vistas, real and imagined, in Ireland and beyond. The album is built around nine choral pieces, by contemporary Irish composers Seán Doherty, Rhona Clarke, and Michael Holohan. Each piece is preceded by the poem on which it is based, and these are interspersed with thematically resonant readings by Paula Meehan, Dairena Ní Chinnéide, and Marina Carr. Carl Corcoran reads texts by poets unknown or no longer living, including W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Irish-American modernist Lola Ridge (1873–1941), while Dairena Ní Chinnéide lends her voice, and her dialect, to the words of fellow Irish-language poet Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916–77).
