Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Poet Moya Cannon, who was a longtime resident of Galway City, will launch her latest collection, ‘Bunting’s Honey’, later this month. Published by UK company Carcanet Press, it includes poems on healing wells and wars, lost friends and species, pre-history and light, as Moya explores humanity’s connection to our endangered earth and seas. She also considers the role of music and art in our lives.

“The title poem, Bunting’s Honey, relates to the Belfast Harp festival of 1792, when 19-year-old Edward Bunting was commissioned to collect the music of the surviving itinerant Irish harpers,” she explains.

Following that commission, Bunting developed a life-long interest in the ancient harp airs and in the harpers who were custodians of that music.

Moya describes her poem as a tribute to those who composed and played that music and also to those who collected it. Long after their deaths, those collectors’ work allowed for a renaissance of that same musical tradition, she says.

This new collection sees Moya continuing to pursue themes she has explored in her previous books.

She writes about “our physical, emotional, aesthetic and spiritual links to sea, shore and mountains”, as well as “the layering of human histories, from the personal to the political, which mark and make a place”.

However, her concern about “our human recklessness” and the threats people pose to the planet has resulted in a “lower note” too.

‘Bunting’s Honey’ is published by the renowned Carcanet Press. Its editor and associate publisher John McAuliffe who acquired the world rights for the book, describes Moya as “one of Ireland’s most significant and beloved poets”.

He adds: “This brilliant, light-filled book maps her characteristically long view of the natural world with her feeling for human suffering.

“The poems powerfully look at how the arts communicate how we must change our lives to protect our inheritances and future generations.”

This is her seventh book, but Moya can still be surprised by how poems take shape.

“Sometimes I feel like a turnstone, the quick little bird that tosses over pebbles on the beach in search of the nourishment lying beneath,” she explains.

“Nobody knows where a poem might be found, or, more likely, where a poem might find its writer. It is hard to say why particular moments of our lives are illuminated or why incidents or experiences can lodge in the heart, mind and body, sometimes for years, asking to be voiced.”

Music and art are hugely important to Moya, who feels they “give us a sense of the inner lives of our human predecessors, their griefs, gaieties and passions”. She explores that connection in this “book of wonderings and wanderings”. Many of her wanderings are on familiar territory that’s explored on foot; the Burren and the Wicklow hills, Galway and the Aran Islands,  Achill, Dublin Bay and North West Donegal. Other poems will bring her readers to a French village on the banks of the Saône, to the Venetian Island of Torcello, or to a sacred mountain lake in China.

“There are a number of elegies and since, unfortunately, we live again in deeply troubled times, war has made its way into the poems too,” she says.

Born in Donegal, where she was reared in an Irish-speaking family, Moya  graduated from UCD with a BA in History and Politics, and has an MPhil in International Relations from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Having spent most of her adult life in Galway, she and her husband now live in Dublin.

A recipient of the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award, she was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University and was elected to Áosdána in 2004.

Bunting’s Honey, which is a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, is being published in Ireland and the UK this month by Carcanet and in the US on July 31.

Pictured: Poet Moya Cannon, a longtime resident of Galway City.