Keats Lives
"Keats Lives" is Moya Cannon's fifth collection of poems. Characteristically rich in the moods and rhythms of the poet's western Irish homeland, it is also drawn farther afield, towards contemplation of the disasters of previous centuries, their "many victories, many collars, little grace". "What shift of bedrock, what metamorphosis", asks the poet, "might heal such wounded, wounding ground?" An answer is sought in the conversation – the conversion – between politics and ecology: precise, shell-like meditations on the natural world – snow drops and almond blossom, nights of summer thunder – are described with the same humane, delicate energy as warzones and prison camps. Between these extremes, and balanced by them, Homer and Achilles, Shakespeare and Cromwell, "cattle-herders, butter-makers, singers, dancers" live out their "sliver of the earth's time" by the same equalizing measure of mountains and forests, 'the gold-struck, mercury sea". The collection unifies these pasts in the symbolic curia of the museum and library, from where so many of Cannon's poems take wing, pursuing objects beyond their material presence into their haunted pasts, objects that, to paraphrase the collection's closing poem, "we have often seen before but have never heard".
About the Author
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.
