"Rachael Hegarty's Dancing with Memory is a unique suite of poems -
and of dances - where a parent's dissipating memories are renewed and
reoccurred 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
