Moya Cannon is one of the finest contemporary poets of the Irish landscape, of place and places, present and past, between now and deep time. Her gift for capturing and being caught by the momentary is matched by the line-by-line vitality of her writing. She has a remarkable ability to see the poem within a given scene or occurrence and to reveal it to us in plain, unforced language, as natural as a speaking voice. Her poems celebrate the world with rare sagacity and perception. It is hard not to think that this relates to the fact that Irish is her first language, a fact that finds moving expression in her ‘Quarrel with the Lexicographers’ where we also see how rooted her life-story is in the landscapes to which she homes so often.

Caught offers nine new poems, the first gathering of her work since the publication of her Collected Poems in 2021.

A Quarrel with the Lexicographers

The dictionary is unambiguous
It says the word comes
from ‘coire’, cauldron,
but the lexicographers haven’t climbed
Croaghan on Achill and looked down
from its northern flank
into silver-rimmed Loch Bunnafreva,
or trudged up Tonlegee’s
brown, soggy shoulder
and seen that high sliver of light
as the mountain begins to reveal its treasure
or, as a child, scrambled up the skree skirt
of Eachla Beag, to be astounded
by a great lake hung between three peaks.

It’s not just the closeness of the name
to coeur, croí, or corazón which persuades
me it’s a cognate, a word-cousin,
it’s the way my own heart leaps
every time I find a corrie lake, away up
in skree and heather, at the core
of a glacier-scoured mountain.