Donegal Tarantella

Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with five published collections, the most recent being Keats Lives (Carcanet). The mountains, the shoreline and our primal and enduring responses to the beauty of the endangered earth are the inspiration for many of her poems. Archaeology and geology figure too as gateways to deeper understanding of our mysterious relationship with the natural world and our past.Music, particularly traditional Irish music, has always been a deep interest and is a constant theme. She has received the Brendan Behan Award and the O'Shaughnessy Award and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. She was born in Co. Donegal and now lives in Dublin.

'a music which is all their own, through which the reader can enter a unique dialogue between elegy and celebration' - Eavan Boland; 'a deep interiority and soaring lyricism... a showing forth of the earth.' - Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; '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