Ciarán O’Rourke writes: Writing mainly of animals and artefacts, local history and local weather, Moya Cannon may nevertheless be ranked among the great love poets of this island. Her work expresses kinship with a world it feels impelled to examine in detail, embodying, in its limpid, exploring flow, an openness to manifold life – with all its hope and harshness. ‘Some things can’t be caught in words, she notes, an insight that somehow enlivens her own creative impulse: to join her praise of the earth to the earth itself, that mix of gravity and mud ‘tugging at some uncharted artery of the human heart’. For her, nature and human nature are, fundamentally, one and the same.
In his long litany of place-poems (‘Anahorish’, ‘Glanmore’, ‘Mossbawn’) Seamus Heaney seemed to be shoring up – with each intricate evocation – his own resources of felt experience, preserving in language the love- or grief-tinged landscapes of an era that he knew, nevertheless, to be vanishing. Although similarly aware of the recurring rhythms and indelible changes that can mould a life, Cannon generally forgoes the temptation to paint the world in her own image. She views reality in both close-up and the longue durée, peering into the sad wreckage of a bird’s ribcage on a beach, say, and discovering not only a site of decay or loss but a portrait of time on the move: a pattern glimpsed and repeated down the wind-bright centuries, which somehow console in their immensity and silence. ‘Start again from nothing and scrape,’ she urges in one piece, ‘since scraping is now part of us.’ ‘Nothing we make,’ she concludes in another, ‘is as strong / or as light / as this.’
Cannon seems to think of herself an inscriptionist, someone whose careful crafting helps to honour and remember quintessential things. Without fuss or pretensions, refusing grandiosity, she skirts the various battlefields of history in search of buried music, discarded vessels – washing them clean so we can appreciate their warmth. Like a clearing rain, her poetry coaxes sky and sea into revealing their hidden depths, a drifting ripple that restores the air. There was once a wonder, she recalls, in hearing the ‘whisper of barnacles to each other / as I laid my head down amongst them.’
Known for the tidal fluency of her perceptions, Cannon’s words seem shaped and sheened by the most elemental of energies – as though her poems were drawn from ‘the core / of a glacier-sculpted mountain’, glistening like trickled water or the purest light. It seems somehow characteristic that she should feel a sensation of ‘companionship’, rather than dread or existential panic, in knowing that ‘four hundred million years / after it cooled in darkness / granite is frost-shattered into diamonds’ – or indeed that she should hit on such a meditative find while walking the Wicklow hills.
While her intimacy of tone and address is remarkable, Cannon’s voice nevertheless often remains pitched beyond immediacies, towards a zone located somewhere in early time or distant space – travelling onwards like an emerging rainbow, freighted with light, or like her ‘Arctic Tern’, ‘the beat of its small heart, / a span between arctic poles.’ As she reminds us in ‘Pascal’:
our spinning, sea-blue earth,
our sun and sister-planets,
are smaller than salt grains
in the dark, rushing theatre of space
‘A species’, she further observes in ‘Die-back’, ‘can disappear discreetly, / with no official count-down’ and none of the operatic ‘drama / of an asteroid or an ice-age’.
For Cannon, discretion is both a virtue and a means of approach: a kind of emotional dialect, innately understood, that allows her to enter the slipstream of a given moment. It is part of ‘our humanity’, Cannon suggests, to feel ‘warm-blooded, bewildered’, in the face of a common mystery. For nobody, as she asserts elsewhere,
[…] knows what joy the stone holds
in its stone heart,
or whether the lark is full of sorrow
as it springs against the sky.
In her most recent collection, Bunting’s Honey, Cannon reminds us that a material force may be monolithically vast without being, for that reason, reassuring. Facing up to the shadow of ‘greed’ – that devouring monster that seems so much to reign in the labyrinth of human history – and its creature, ‘poverty’, she writes: ‘poor people still put out in small boats / and young bodies wash in with the tide.’ Her soft, searching questions can resonate with a thunder-clap of revelation. ‘What does dúchas mean,’ she asks, ‘and why has such violence / been wreaked in its gentle name?’ A ‘millennium from now’, she later wonders, ‘will anyone, perchance, survive / to interpret our cacophony’, or indeed ‘to continue the work?’
Consistently (and to that degree, courageously), Cannon also seeks out the ‘germ of tenderness’ that must – she tells us – endure ‘down in the dark or the half-dark’, at the root of existence. In a paradoxical manner, the very uncertainty shrouding such a speculation generates the glow by which her poems, with wandering steps and slow, as it were, through Eden take their solitary way: always finding the earth anew. ‘Against the glitter and stench / of battles won and lost,’ she sings, ‘stories of dreams and grief / are what bind the world together’. In an age of ‘cruel soldiers’ and hubristic demagogues, when the extractive designs of empire and technology can appear omnipotent, Cannon’s blend of dedication and humility is moving, and powerful. Her ‘wondering’ is itself a vital act, a way of mending the fabric of a tarnished time – each poem ‘a testimony / to waves succumbed to / and survived.’
14/7/2025
