Wildflowers are like poems because they ambush us in the most unexpected places. In Rachael Hegarty's exhilarating new collection they unlock memories and meditations. Snapdragons conjure a Finglas childhood, the scent of wild roses distil the essence of a grandmother, iris unlock the momory of a first date and rock centaury evokes fears of global warming. Wildflowers on the Darndale Roundabout is the poetic equivalent of opening a lavish volume of botanical illustrations. Hegarty uses each plant as a touchstone to venture into her past and present and venture across Ireland – from finding western gorse beyond Derry Walls to discovering mountain avens growing wild in the Burren. Her eye roams at will, ready to be caught and surprised by sudden explosions of wild colour, by incursions of nature busting forth, captured in a dazzling array of forms. This book is a bouquet for everyone.

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

Winner of the 2018 Shine/Strong Poetry Award

This powerful debut collection takes us back to ‘the hatchling, nestling, fledgling grounds’ of Finglas where Rachael Hegarty was born and reared. Portrait of a working class community, portrait of a dispossessed and politically betrayed community, portrait of a self-reliant, proud, and supportive community — ultimately it is a portrait made with love and gratitude, to family, to neighbours, to friends of her youth, feral and otherwise, to teachers and to her own students, by a sophisticated and knacky literary artist of the highest integrity. This is a joyous and clear eyed book that draws on and augments the song tradition of an artistically rich area of north Dublin, a lyric tradition that encompasses Bono and Dermot Bolger; it opens that tradition to the critique and edge of contemporary poetry practice, and to the winds of Japan, Boston, Walden Pond, Emily Dickinson’s Garden. Compassionate to the living and to the dead alike, this poet stakes her ground, as mother, as lover, as artist, as link in the eternal and marvellous chain of being.

Paula Meehan

What an extraordinary book this is. What a challenge, to give voices to the dead. And how triumphantly Rachael Hegarty succeeds, how utterly convincing these poems are in their delicacy, their humour, and the truth of their language; how well her words become these people, who now become the protagonists of their own lives. There are many lovely things here, in this book that is full of love.

Ciaran Carson