Book description
Carrying the Songs explores what is lost to time and change, and
what endures and is transformed: languages and landscapes, artefacts
and songs, carried through a lifetime, across oceans, across
centuries. A long-forgotten Gaelic word surfaces from childhood and is
reanimated by use; a tiny Stone Age carving speaks across millennia of
a shared human impulse to create. At the heart of this collection is
migration, the rhythm that draws together the natural and the human
worlds. Luminous and precise, Moya Cannon's poetry resonates like
remembered songs. Included with the new poems in Carrying the Songs is
a generous selection of the poems from Moya Cannon's much-praised
earlier collections, Oar and The Parchment Boat.
Moya Cannon was born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal in 1956 and now
lives in Galway. She studied history and politics at University College,
Dublin and international relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Her first collection, Oar, won the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and, in
2001, she was the recipient of the Laurence O Shaughnessy Award
(University of St. Thomas, Minnesota). A number of her poems have been
set to music by Jane O Leary, Philip Martin and Ellen Cranitch, and she
has worked with traditional Irish musicians, amongst them Kathleen
Loughnane and Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, both in the context of
performance and of translating Gaelic songs. Moya Cannon has edited
Poetry Ireland Review and, in 2004, was elected to Aosdana, the Irish
affiliation of creative artists. In 2011 she was the holder of the
Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, PA.
