Keats Lives

Keats Lives is Moya Cannon's fifth collection of poems. It is rich in the moods and rhythms of the poet's western Irish homeland, its seascapes and mountain ranges. But it also travels further afield, to contemplate the triumphs and mistakes of earlier centuries, their 'many victories, many collars, little grace'. 'What shift of bedrock, what metamorphosis,' asks the poet, 'might heal such wounded, wounding ground?' The poems seek an answer in the conversation, the converging, of politics and ecology: tight, shell-like meditations on the natural world are touched with the same humane, precise energy as war-zones and prison camps. In the symbolic curia of the museum and library, where many of Cannon's poems take off, simple objects are unfolded into their imagined pasts. These are objects that, to paraphrase the collection's closing poem, 'we have often seen before, but have never heard'.

Moya Cannon was born in County Donegal, spent most of her adult life in Galway and now lives in Dublin. She is the author of four previous collections of poems, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (2007) and Hands (2011). She studied at University College, Dublin, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A winner of the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and the Lawrence O Shaughnessy Award, she has edited Poetry Ireland Review and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University.