“Rachael
Hegarty’s Dancing with Memory is a unique suite of poems – and of dances –
where a parent’s dissipating memories are renewed and recoloured in vivid,
tender and honest verses that span a lifetime. Shot through with love, these
poems not only recreate memories slipping away from a mother afflicted by
dementia, but grow into a social portrait of Irish working class life over the
past century through a mosaic of memories. Each moment is framed amid the swirl
of a new dance, from Charlestons danced in wartime inner city flats to new
crazes embraced as each turbulent decade passes, bringing joys and afflictions.
It is a beautifully rendered tribute to a woman whose dance card in life was
always full: a compassionate collection that conjures its own soundtrack,
culled from a well-lived life.” Dermot Bolger
“Terpsichore
is the Muse of Dance, one of the nine Muses, those daughters of Memory; and
Terpsichore is surely the guardian spirit in Rachael Hegarty’s new collection
of poetry. Here is a biography of her mother, Bernadette, charted through dance
as it moves through the mother, the culture, the city of Dublin. And through
the generations.
We dance with Bernadette through the
beats, the steps, the stomps, the swings, the glides, the verve of these lines
of poetry. We share the childhood, the coming to womanhood, the early
motherhood, the glorious rambunctiousness of her large brood, the loneliness of
her widowhood, through her bleak times and times of joy. When Bernadette begins
her amnesiac journey into dementia, Rachael Hegarty’s act of remembrance comes
home to us in its full significance: the poet become the mother’s memory
keeper.
The work is cast in the enduring lyric
patterns of sonnet & villanelle, These inherited patterns, whose roots go
back to folksong, allow for a powerful formal enshrining of that life. They
scan Bernadette from the cradle in 1937 to the announcement of lockdown in the
spring of 2020, when she is already in a care home. Traditional forms,
contraptions of memory themselves, have the accumulated power of centuries
behind them, and in Rachael Hegarty’s deft hands are fit and noble vehicles for
witness.
In this age of transition, when we are
handing authority for memory to the machines, where we have governance by
metadata, one of Poetry’s destinies is to continue to dignify human memory, to
value its retrievals, to build an archive of individual truth. In this new work
Rachael Hegarty puts all her considerable craft & art at its service.” Paula Meehan