‘The orchestra of memory’: Music, sound and silence in Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song

Before his untimely death in 2014, Dermot Healy had established a reputation as a penetrating chronicler of contemporary rural Ireland in all its emotional, cultural and moral complexity.1 He did so, moreover, across a variety of literary forms – poetry, drama, self-writing and fiction – and with reference to a number of recurring devices and motifs. One of the most potent motifs or devices permeating the canon of Healy’s work is that of sound: from the early short stories to the late poetry and the final novel, Healy’s Ireland is a noisy place, full of human and natural sounds, many of which are musical, all of which may be observed to engage with the developing narrative in complex ways.2