Deer Medicine - Clare McCotter

In the darkling hinterland we call memory loss the past is a strange country, the present a place of endlessly shifting sand. Here the old maps make no sense: the signposts are mercurial, the constellations in disarray, and the seas have all changed their names. To navigate such terrain one must become a maker of new maps. Approaching her subject cautiously and with compassion Clare McCotter’s third book of poems is a sustained meditation on the masterful, and many, navigations that people diagnosed with dementia and memory loss make on a daily basis. Drawing on McCotter’s personal experience as a daughter, cousin, and friend of people for whom the past and present shape-shifted sadly into something other, and on her years of work as mental health nurse, Deer Medicine explores ways of seeing, of hearing, of speaking to, of being with when the old landmarks have gone, when rock and tree and star have vanished and nothing that is was. An attempt to touch this place, Deer Medicine urges its readers to reach into that world rather than trying to drag its inhabitants into theirs. With such distances progress will be limited. But what is the alternative? Trying to orientate people to a reality no longer their own comes at too high a price. This price, the price of medicine, is a central concern in the collection. As the title suggests, these poems explore the cost and nature of the cure. In the landscapes McCotter creates medicine takes many forms: prayer, incantation, cobweb, wild thyme, a swiftlet tattoo, the hollow bone of a crow, a deer’s scent on pearls spun from the areola of the moon.