The Parchment Boat

Who made the parchment boat?
Who bent and bound ribs of drifted wood
to a long clean frame?
Who stretched sealskins,
plaited sinew,
stitched the stitches?
Which mapped the making,
which mapped the wounds,
which curved along the edges of the lives of seals,
the edges of the lives of women,
the edges of the lives of men.

"Moya Cannon’s newly published second collection of poetry, The Parchment Boat, contains the subtly evoked passion and meditative restraint that was distinctive in Oar (1990), her first collection. The "skin" boat is just one of the many objects Cannon finds from the landscape and the natural world that operate as metaphors for human suffering, exultation and endurance."

Katie Donovan The Irish Times

"The intensely lyrical musings on life, landscape and love stir the heart, disturb the settled thought and, more in this collection than in the earlier, soothe the soul. Like her fellow northerner, Seamus Heaney, Cannon digs deep with the pen. And whilst the theme of sea voyaging and water inform the titles of both her books, that which the earth throws up is of equal fascination."

Anne Lucey, The Cork Examiner