A word does not head out alone.
It is carried about the way something essential,
a blade, say, or a bowl,
is brought from here to there when there is work to be done.
Sometimes, after a long journey,
it is pressed into a different service.

from 'Timbre'

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.

'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

Contents



I

Winter Birds 13

Carrying the Songs 14

Timbre 15

Our Words 16

First Poetry 17

Forgetting Tulips 18

Augers 19

Demolition 20

Oughterard Lemons 21

Golden Lane 22

Indigo 23

Rún 24

Starlings 26

Bright City 27

Stranger 28

Walking out to Island Eddy 29

Sheep at Night in the InaghValley 30

Weaning 31

Whin 32

Barbari 33



II

To Colmcille Returning 37

Going for Milk 38

Script 40

Shells 41

Survivors 42

Breastbone 43

Exuberance 44

Banny 45

Orientation 46

Aubade 47

Pollen 48

Vogelherd Horse, 30,000 BC 49

Chauvet 50

The Force 51

Lamped 52



fromOar

Eagles’ Rock 55

Holy Well 56

Thirst in the Burren 57

Oar 58

Thalassa 59

‘Taom’ 60

Tree Stump 61

Turf Boats 62

Prodigal 63

No Sense in Talking 64

Hills 66

The Foot of Muckish 67

Listening Clay 68

Easter 69

Scar 70

Eros 71

Afterlove 72

Narrow Gatherings 73

Dark Spring 75

Wet Doves 76

Nest 77

Crow’s Nest 78

After the Burial 79

Sympathetic Vibration 80

Foundations 81

Votive Lamp 82



fromThe ParchmentBoat

Crannóg 85

Shards 86

Introductions 87

Murdering the Language 88

Hunter’s Moon 89

Ontario Drumlin 90

Patched Kayak 91

Oysters 92

Tending 93

Violin 94

Viola d’Amore 95

Arctic Tern 96

Milk 97

Winter Paths 98

Hazelnuts 99

Mountain 100

Scríob 101

Thole-Pin 102

Easter Houses 103

Song in Windsor, Ontario 104

Driving through Light inWest Limerick 105

Attention 107

An Altered Gait 108

Bulbs 109

Night 110

Migrations 111

Between the Jigs and theReels 112