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Hands

Moya Cannon

Hands by Moya Cannon
10% off eBook (EPUB)
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Categories: 21st Century, Irish, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847779878
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2011)
9781847771421
£9.95 £8.96
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  • A high corner of the apple tree shakes
    as a thrush pecks and pecks at one of the last apples.
    The sun slants onto the thrush and the apple
    which has a crater in it.

    This is what apples are for,
    to be turned into song.
    'Crater'




    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.
    Soundpost
    Reed-Making
    Driving back over the Blue Ridge,
    Openings
    Still Life
    All this green day
    Only the shadows
    October
    Val de Luz
    Farrera Light
    No Good Reason
    Hands
    Orchids
    Yesterday I was listening on the iPod
    Parisii
    Little Skellig
    Sea Urchins
    The Fertile Rock
    Lady Gregory at Cill Ghobnait
    Nausts
    Eliza Murphy
    Crater
    The Magician’s Tale
    In the Underground Car Park
    Brought to Book
    Loch
    ‘We Are What We Eat.’
    Alma,
    I thought
    Two Doors
    Green Cities
    Swans at Nimmo’s Pier
    The Washing
    The Train
    Halloween Windfalls
    Death,
    The Red Tree
    Hedgehog
    RNA
    Consider the Cocosphere
    Blue Saxophones
    The Important Dead
    In the Lava Pipe
    The white cyclamen
    Flowers at Loughcrew
    Apples and Fire
    Harmonic Vases
    He looks so carefully
    Midday at Stockholm Airport
    Night Road in the Mountains
    Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with six published collections, the most recent being Donegal Tarantella (Carcanet). The mountains, the shoreline and our primal and enduring responses to the beauty of the endangered earth are the inspiration for many of her poems. Archaeology and geology figure too as gateways to deeper ... read more
    Praise for Moya Cannon  'Three decades of poems from one of Ireland's finest contemporary writers. It is assured, consistent and has a quality both ancient and timeless.'

    Seán Hewitt, Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2021

    'From start to finish the freshness and vitality as well as the accomplished choice of image and expression reveal themselves...This is a super collection.'

    Malcolm Carson, The High Window

    'Across three decades of work, these poems demonstrate the marked consistency of a poet whose early collections are accomplished and assured, and who knows how to take her time, and how best to use it... This is an essential book for anyone interested in contemporary Irish poetry. If, for Emily Dickinson, a good poem should make one feel as though the top of one's head were taken off, Moya Cannon's have the effect of blowing an ember, of kindling a light, revealing the strange images passed down to us.'

    Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

    'Reading these poems is often akin to travelling through time - or being made aware of layers of time before our own'

    Robyn Bolam, The High Window

    'The unshowiness of her work, the apparent careful weighing of words, is one of its appealing characteristics: for Cannon this seems not just a question of style but a necessary way in which to be true to her own sense of wonder in the world.'

    Gerard Smyth, Dublin Review of Books

    'Moya Cannon has a talent for the long shot; whole vistas open up in a handful of words... a master at evoking [time's] mysterious slippery quality... [her] unerring pared back poems express [a] deep knowledge and affection again and again.'

     

    Martina Evans, The Irish Times 

     'A revelation in its range and depth. These poems are written out of Moya Cannon's enduring preoccupations: with history - especially the history of exile and displacement - with music, language, loss. True to the shifts of real experience, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ironic, she deploys an understated technique, in a voice that is deliberate, exact and witty. Here are poems, landscapes alive with birds, people and stories, that show us our world, our past and culture through the gift of just, joyful words; they help us to reflect and to live.'
    Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
    'These wonderful poems lay down not just a landscape and a history, but a music which is all their own, through which the reader can enter a unique dialogue between elegy and celebration.'
    Eavan Boland
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