Carrying the Songs
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€16.99
"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, Co. Donegal in 1956. She studied history and politics at University College, Dublin, and international relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has published two collections of poems, Oar (Salmon Press, Galway, 1990) and The Parchment Boat (Gallery Press, Meath, 1997). She has been editor of Poetry Ireland Review and has been writer in residence at Trent University, Ontario and at the Centre Culturel, Paris. A recipient of the Brendan Behan Award and of the Lawrence O Shaughnessy Award, she was elected to Aosdana, the affiliation of Irish writers and visual artists, in 2004. She teaches at a school for adolescent travellers in Galway.