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