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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.
In Moya Cannon's new collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight.
This volume collects the five major books of one of Ireland's leading writers.
This collection won the Behan Memorial Award for the best first collection in 1991 and is being re-issued by The Gallery Press. Her poems embody the hills and holy wells, dolmens and flora, and the traffic of turf boats along the western seaboard. They dwell also on music and, in a series of love lyrics, on tender places, responsive to all kinds of tides.
An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021 In Collected Poems one of Ireland's best-loved contemporary poets brings together poems from her six principal collections, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (1907), Hands (2011), Keats Lives (2015) and Donegal Tarantella (2019) - more than three decades' work - a poetry of individual poems which compose a memorable, unpredictable sequence of discovery. The immediacy of our response to the beauty of our exploited planet inspire many of Moya Cannon's poems. The perfection of very early cave art she sees as testimony to the centrality of art in our evolution as humans. Geology, archaeology, history and music figure as gateways to...
Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: A Lost Pastoral Rhythm: The Poetry of John Montague -- Chapter 2: "The God in the Tree" : Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition -- Chapter 3: "Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place " : Michael Longley's Environmental Elegies -- Chapter 4: Learning the Lingua Franca of a Lost Land: Eavan Boland's Suburban Pastoral -- Chapter 5: "In My Handerkerchief of a Garden" : Medbh McGuckian's Miniature Pastoral Retreats -- Chapter 6: "When Ireland Was Still under a Spell" : Miraculous Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill -- Conclusion: The Future of Pastoral -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Mapping the changes that have occurred in Irish literature over the past fifty years, this volume includes twenty-one writers, poets, and playwrights from the North and South of Ireland, who tell their own stories. They are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are vivid personal accounts of their experiences as women writing during a pivotal period in the history of Ireland. With a foreword by Martina Devlin, and an introduction by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, the anthology includes essays by Cherry Smyth, Mary Morrissy, Lia Mills, Moya Cannon, Aine Ní Ghlinn, Catherine Dunne, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O'Donnell, Mary O'Malley, Ruth Carr, Evelyn Conlon, Anne Devlin, Ivy Bannister, Sophia Hillan, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Dorcey, Celia de Fréine, Máiríde Woods, Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, and Phyl Herbert.
Incorrigibly Plural celebrates the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice's writing. Poets and critics illuminate the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognised as central to modern poetry in English. Contributions include responses to MacNeice by poets such as Paul Farley, Leontia Flynn, Nick Laird, Derek Mahon, Glyn Maxwell and Paul Muldoon; discussions by critics such as Neil Corcoran, Valentine Cunningham, Hugh Haughton, Peter McDonald and Clair Wills; and more biographical accounts, including a memoir by MacNeice's son, the late Dan MacNeice. For each of them, MacNeice remains a continuing presence for his insight into the mechanisms of the modern world, his complex political awareness, his ability to bring the historical moment alive. Above all, what emerges is pleasure in MacNeice's plurality of language and forms. More than a retrospective work of criticism, Incorrigibly Plural belongs to live debates about contemporary poetry.
Painting Rain explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape a world. Hers is an ambitious meditation, from that point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet. The home, the city's heart, neglected suburban battlegrounds, all are shot through with visionary light. In poems of loss, hymns to the empty world, celebrations of people and place, Meehan confronts the darkness that everywhere threatens. These are poems that sustain belief in the power of language to reveal, interrogate and heal.
Windharp: Niall MacMonagle's essential anthology of the last century of Irish poetry The Easter Rising of 1916 was a foundational moment of the independent Irish state; but while that insurrection continues to divide opinion, there is no disagreement as to the majesty of Yeats's 'Easter 1916', or about the excellence of the Irish poetic tradition over the past century. Windharp is an anthology that follows the twists and turns of Irish history, culture and society through the work of its remarkable standing army of poets. Edited by Niall MacMonagle, Ireland's most trusted poetry commentator,Windharp is an accessible and inspiring journey through a century of Irish life. 'A landmark book' Clive James, TLS Books of the Year 'Glorious' Irish Examiner 'Beautifully produced ... an appealing and appetite-whetting introduction to a century's poetry' Irish Times 'Beautifully judged ... poised perfectly between the canon and the tradition, with a generous inclusiveness' Eavan Boland, Irish Times 'A perfect selection. One of the best anthologies of Irish poetry ever produced.' Donal Ryan