Moya Cannon

Life
1956- ; b. Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal; ed. UCD, grad. in history and politics; proceeded to and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (International Relations); issued Oar (1990), based on landscapes of the Burren and Co. Galway, and winner of Brendan Behan award for a first collection; ed. Poetry Ireland Review; writer-in-residence, Trent University, Ontario, 1994-95; issued The Parchment Boat (1997), a second collection; broadcasts on RTÉ radio and TV and on BBC Radio 4; lives in Galway; teaches teaches at special school for the traveller children; winner of Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award of Univ. of St Thomas, Minnesota, 2001 ($5,000); elected to Aosdána, 2004; issued Carrying the Songs (2007), new and selected poems.

[ top ]

Works
Oar (Salmon Poetry 1990, 1994), [10] 48pp., and Do. [another edn.] (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2000), 56pp.; The Parchment Boat (Dublin: Gallery Press 1997), 45pp.; Carrying the Songs (Manchester: Carcanet 2007), 112pp. [new and selected; ded. to John Moriarty].

See also Moya Cannon on “The Hospital” by Patrick Kavanagh, in Irish University Review [Special Poetry Issue], ed. Peter Denman (Sept. 2009) [available online; or see full text copy in RICORSO Library - attached.]

[ top ]

Quotations
Taom”: ‘There are small unassailable words / that diminish caesars; / territories of the voice / that intimate across death and generation / how a secret was imparted - /that first articulation, / when a vowel was caught / between a strong and tender consonant;/when someone, in anguish, / made a new and mortal sound.’ (Quoted in review, Books Ireland, May 1998, p.128.)

Carrying the Songs”: ‘It was always those with little else to carry / who carried the songs / to Babylon, / to the Mississippi - / some of these last possessed less than nothing / did not own their own bodies ... // For those who left my county, / girls from Downings and the Rosses / who followed herring boats north to Shetland / gutting the sea's silver as they went / or boys from Ranafast who took the Derry boat, / who slept over a rope in a bothy, / songs were their souls’ currency / the pure metal of their hearts [...]’ (Quoted by Hugh McFadden, reviewing Carrying the Songs, in Books Ireland, Sept. 2008, p.189; also quotes “Exuberance”, a poem ded. to the late Fergal O’Connor, OP, UCD philosopher and teacher, recalling student days and his teaching.)

[ top ]

References
Webpage at www.rte.ie/culture/millennia/people/cannonmoya.html [defunct Jan. 2008].

[ top ]

Notes
Écrire l’Europe/Writing Europe (2003), the Franco-Irish Literary festival, Dublin Castle (chaired by Michael Cronin); invited Irish authors incl. Moya Cannon, Colm Tóibín, Keith Ridgeway, Evelyn Conlon, Peter Fallon.

[ top ]