Carrying the Songs

Overview

Migrations—of birds, people, words, and songs—and the ravages of time are luminously explored in this wonderful collection of poems. At their core, the poems draw together the natural and human worlds through resonating, rhythmic prose. A selection of poems from the poet’s previous collections is also included.

Reviews

"These wonderful poems lay down not just a landscape and a history, but a music which is all their own."  —Eavan Boland, poet; Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities, Stanford Univerisity

"[The collection's] sterling qualities are manifest and manifold: a deep interiority and soaring lyricism, and an ability to produce what Tim Robinson has termed 'geophany', a showing forth of the earth." —Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, author, Pharaoh's Daughter

"The intensely lyrical musings on life, landscape and love stir the heart, disturb the settled thought and, more in this collection than in the earlier, soothe the soul. Like her fellow northerner, Seamus Heaney, Cannon digs deep with the pen. And whilst the theme of sea voyaging and water inform the titles of both her books, that which the earth throws up is of equal fascination." —The Cork Examiner

Author Biography

Moya Cannon is the author of two previous poetry collections, Oar and The Parchment Boat, and a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review. She is a recipient of the Brendan Behan and the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Awards.