Keats Lives

Moya Cannon’s new collection reaches back into the long past, showing how traces left behind – textile fragments, buried thimbles, cave paintings – enable us to make imaginative connections with our distant ancestors, emphasising the commonalities of human lives lived many centuries apart. At the heart of the book is the vital importance of art, as the means by which we give permanence to the fleeting moments of our lives; and our need for a connection to the natural world, even in the most mechanised of modern environments. As the train conductor in the title poem asserts, ‘“I’m going to get a T-shirt with / Keats Lives on it. This time of year, […] when everything starts coming green again, / I always think of him…”’.

Moya Cannon was born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal in 1956 and now lives in Galway. Her first collection, Oar, won the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and, in 2001, she was the recipient of the Laurence O Shaughnessy Award (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota). Moya Cannon has edited Poetry Ireland Review and, in 2004, was elected to Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of creative artists. In 2011 she was the holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, PA.