Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon is an Irish poet.  She was born in Co. Donegal and now lives in Dublin.   Her work reflects a large range of interests: music, history, migration, archaeology, geology and our long relationship to our earth and seas. Her sixth collection is Donegal Tarantella, Carcanet Press, 2019, and her Collected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in February, 2021.

Latest Books

Collected Poems

Published 25th February 2021 | Paperback | 256 pages

Collected Poems brings together poems from six previous collections, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (2007), Hands (2011), Keats Lives (2015) and Donegal Tarantella (2019), more than three decades’ work, individual poems which compose a memorable, unpredictable sequence of discovery.

‘These wonderful poems lay down not just a landscape and a history, but a music which is all their own, through which the reader can enter a unique dialogue between elegy and celebration.’

Eavan Boland (Carrying the Songs)

Donegal Tarantella

Published: September 2019 | Paperback | 80 pages

Moya Cannon’s sixth collection gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.

A revelation in its range and depth. These poems are written out of Moya Cannon’s enduring preoccupations: with history – especially the history of exile and displacement – with music, language, loss. True to the shifts of real experience, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ironic, she deploys an understated technique, in a voice that is deliberate, exact and witty. Here are poems, landscapes alive with birds, people and stories, that show us our world, our past and culture through the gift of just, joyful words; they help us to reflect and to live.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Moya Cannon reading "Carrying the Songs"

This video was recorded by the UCD Poetry Archive and forms part of a series of readings by contemporary Irish poets.

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