In Moya Cannon's new collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight.
Luminous and precise, the Irish writer Mora Cannon's poems explore what is lost to time and change, and what endures and is transformed.
