Poetry: Moya Cannon's Carrying the Songs, made up of new and selected poems, is an important milestone in this well-respected poet's development, since its first 52 pages in fact comprise her third collection.
The book's quietly original title poem forms part of this new work, which explores both movement and song. The flight of birds, and that of Irish migrants - and the way song is carried by such flight - create deep thematic links between the 20 poems of an ambitious opening sequence.
To open a book with such a structure might seem something of a challenge for both poet and reader; but Cannon carries it off with lyric lightness of touch. The set of poems which follows and counterpoints that opening, meanwhile, turns inward, to history and personal experience. And this diptych of new material in turn revives and intensifies poems selected from Cannon's first two books, in which scenes from the natural world and from a personal, emotional life are juxtaposed.
The central role of such thematic concerns in Cannon's work is highlighted by her unpretentious technique. She is a poet writing out of the legacy of the free verse movement of the 1970s and 1980s as much as in a folk tradition - of sincere emotion and of a natural world transformed to symbol. This is as apparent in the easy way the newest poems have with observation - "the lit milk of the bay" (Golden Lane), "the roundness in the blackbird's throat" (The Force) - as in the more worked symbolism of such earlier pieces as Arctic Tern, from 1997's The Parchment Boat: "Much harder to chart,/ less evident,/ is love's second life,/ a tern's egg,/ revealed and hidden/ in a nest of stones/ on a stony shore".
As this example - with its coincidence of phrase and line-break - suggests, universal material is here articulated through an apparently artless prosody. In Script, we find a seal's "blubbery weight galumphing" onomatopoeically down a strand; the gentle rhetoric of Milk, coming in to a mother's breast, "still knows nothing/ but the depth of kinship/ the depth of verse". This is a highly accessible, profoundly human verse.
IF MOYA CANNON'S is an enduring poetic presence, Joe Kane's witty first collection announces a talent which is both genuinely energising and full of generous inventiveness. The Boy Who Nearly Won the Texaco Art Competition does include competition-winning poems: indeed the title poem took first prize in the Arvon Competition. But the glimpses it affords of the world of the emerging poet are wryer and more various than this. Torture by Terzanelle offers us a writing workshop with Nigel McLoughlin which, since the poet teaches at a university in Cheltenham, makes reference to that town's racecourse. A Warning From Peter Sansom In His Book "Writing Poems", meanwhile, is positively inter-textual: Kane rebuffs Sansom's critique of, by coincidence, Moya Cannon.
If this suggests a dry, "brainy" poetry of the academy, nothing could be further from the truth. Suddenly My Mother shows us again the strangeness of old age and death:
a sixteen-year-old girl
stands outside a factory gate, slips
into old age by mistake.
Someone in Winter, meanwhile, explores the terrible intimacy between captured soldiers and their executioners. Joe Kane addresses these big topics with a language which is quiet, almost discreet - "In the foreground/ an intimate scene - /two men touching in communion" - but never lacking in afflatus: "Someone/ out of shot holds the day in his mouth". This light touch is one of the secrets of Kane' comic effect. Pieces like the book's closing riff, the five-page Song of My Amazing Trousers (and a red shirt), deploy a song-like, highly performative attention to both rhythm - "Five years later/ in a Dallas discount store/ All items half price or less" - and the quasi-autonomous life of anecdote: "I forgot to tell you my wife and I/ were about to go on holidays to Spain/ with our friends Eamonn and Eithne/ who had nothing to wear/ and I felt really sorry for them/ although Eithne bought a very expensive pair of sunglasses in the airport". Kane is a charming, companionable writer from whom we can expect to hear more.
JOHN LIDDY'S THE Well is a New and Selected Poems, whose earliest pieces were first published in 1974's Boundaries. Like Moya Cannon's collection, this book opens - intelligently - with the poet's new work: so that it is foregrounded rather than appearing as an afterthought to perhaps-more-familiar material. Liddy has spent much of his adult life working as a librarian, and editor, in Spain; and that rich cultural context is apparent in these poems. The volume charts (in reverse) a gradual relaxation of poetic style from the symbolism of such early poems as Contact, where poet and lover plan to return to a remembered lough to "count the offbeat waters break/ on firm shore and frontal reed", to the more prosaic tone of such poems as Father's Day ("My sons ask about the validity of war./ I answer killing is wrong."). A record of Liddy's response to the poetic influences to which he has been exposed, this book should be read as part of his wider contribution to the present health of Irish poetry.
Fiona Sampson's latest collection is Common Prayer (Carcanet, 2007). She is the editor of Poetry Review
Carrying the Songs By Moya Cannon Carcanet, 112pp. £8.95 The Boy Who Nearly Won the Texaco Art Competition By Joe Kane New Island, 57pp. €12.95 The Well: New and Selected Poems By John Liddy Revival Press, 122pp. €15