Review
Carrying the Songs (Carcanet Press)
The Donegal Blues
Des Kenny finds a rare musicality and beauty in this collection of poetry.
If the blues are, as they say, a ‘Feeling’, then the poetry of Moya Cannon has a strong claim to be their most lyrical expression. Especially in her recently published collection of new and selected poems entitled Carrying the Songs. From the first poem the reader is carried on a stream of lyricism and it comes as no surprise that the final stanzas should underline the importance of music and its ability to express that which poetry possibly cannot:
Because what matters to us most can seldom be told in words the heart’s moods are better charted in its own language- the rhythm of Cooley’s accordion which could open the heart of a stone, John Doherty’s dark reels and the tune that the sea taught him, the high parts of the road and the underworlds which only music and love can brave to bring us back to our senses and on beyond.
As the music masters the airs and tunes that express our inner landscapes, so the poet masters the words that articulate them for:
A word does not head out alone. It is carried about the way something essential, A blade, say, or a bowl, is brought from here to there when there is work to be done. Sometimes, after a long journey, It is pressed into a different service.
In the collection, Cannon uses words in the same way as the musician uses chords and notes to explore the emotional self. Like the Blues Singer does with the chorus, Cannon lays down the line of her main theme with the title poem Carrying the Songs which uses a Frank Harte quote as an epithet: “Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs,” a theme that is to re-echo throughout the collection. There is the suggestion here that without suffering the poet cannot write poetry but, conversely, it is also through the writing of these poems that the poet, and by extension the reader, can achieve a sense of peace and understanding. The true achievement of Moya Cannon as poet is that she can share this wonderful sense of peace. Take the gem of a poem that is “Bright City”
I follow the morning light down the canal path, across the road and on to the Claddagh. In light which has turned the canal, river and estuary to mercury, even the cars on the Long Walk are transfigured Five swans beat their way in past the mud dock, heavy, sounding their own clarion, carrying the world’s beauty in on their strong white backs this Saturday morning.
Moya Cannon’s Carrying the Songs is a collection of rare and fragile beauty which brings with it a sense of peace and fulfillment. It deserves our fullest attention.
