Please join us to celebrate the launch of Collected Poems by Moya Cannon. Hosting the reading will be Professor Margaret Kelleher, joining Moya to discuss the new edition. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will also be showing extracts of the text during the reading so that you can read along.

In Collected Poems one of Ireland’s best-loved contemporary poets brings together poems from her six principal collections, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (1907), Hands (2011), Keats Lives (2015) and Donegal Tarantella (2019), more than three decades’ work, a poetry of individual poems which compose a memorable, unpredictable sequence of discovery. The land- and seascapes and our primal and enduring responses to endangered earth inspire many of her poems. Archaeology and geology figure as gateways to deeper understanding of our relationship with our past and the natural world.

‘Whatever inspiration is,’ she quotes Wisława Szymborska as saying, ‘it is born from a continuous “I don’t know”,’ from the confusion of adolescence to the very different confusions of adult life. There are dark confusions and those which are luminous and filled with joy — desperation and rapture are their extremes. Each poem makes a space in which the readers share experience and discover something uniquely their own as well. She is fortunate enough to have developed in a culture rapidly changing, in which the poetries of the world were becoming available, in which the situation of women was radically changing. She was at once a beneficiary and an agent of change and these poems retain that enabling agency.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.