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.
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[From the cliffs of Northern Greenland the black-breasted geese come down to graze on the wind-bitten sedges of Inis Ce. They land in October, exhausted, bringing with them their almost-grown young - From Winter Birds]***
(Carcanet Press Ltd., 1 April 2008, borrowed from my library)
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This is my first time reading the poet.
I thought the poems in the collection were all well-written, beautiful, lyrical, full of lovely imagery and ideas.
However, none of them really sparked for me.
The main issue I had was with the subject matter, many of the poems took nature or the natural world as a theme. These sorts of poems are not my thing and tend to leave me cold.
