Hands E-Book

Moya Cannon

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

MOYA CANNON

Hands

for John

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors of the following magazines in which some of the poems have previously appeared:

The Cork Review, Five Points, Nordic Irish Studies Journal, PN Review, Poetry International, Poetry Ireland Review, The Shop, Southword, The Stinging Fly, Temenos.

Sincere thanks are also due to the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts, Amherst; and the Centre d’Arte i Natura de Farrera for their gracious hospitality during the writing of some of these poems. I wish also to acknowledge the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland, Charles Heimbold and Villanova University.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

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

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

Soundpost

for the Con Tempo String Quartet

‘Its tone came from the soundpost –

it was made from a bird’s bone.’

A musician tells of his friend’s fiddle,

the one on which so many

well-shaped tunes

had been turned and played.

In French it is called l’âme,

the instrument’s soul;

in Cremona, when the master-luthier

brought a supply of slow-growing timber

down from the high Alps,

to shape around his moulds,

it was called l’anima –

a round peg of wood,

positioned carefully inside the instrument,

almost under the bridge,

to hold apart belly and back,

to gather every vibration of the strings,

every lift and fall of the bower’s wrist,

to carry all that is in us of flight,

through the woods of the instrument.