Hands by Moya Cannon (review)

A reading of Moya Cannon's poetry always brings us to an encounter with the unexpected. Her work in The Parchment Boat(1997) , Oar(2000), and Carrying the Songs(2008) has been acclaimed for its subtle yet profound encounters with the material world, its sense of the present moment situated against the grandeur of its past, and its engagement with the elemental forces that compel time. Cannon's Handscontinues these distinctive contributions to her provocative oeuvre. And yet, Handsrepresents a subtly more intimate collection of poetry, one that brings questions of personal relationship and family loss to Cannon's textured and dense poetry.

Handsoffers the lyric meeting of the nonhuman natural world with acuity and precision. In poems like "All This Green Day" the lines unfold with detailed attention to color and context: "Here and there, in the green cloud of birch and hazel / above the hermitage of Santa Eulalia, / a wild cherry tree sings russet / and the mountain tops around us are furred with trees"—only to open further into the seeming invincibility of the scene: "The bare peaks far to the east / have captured a first fall of snow; / the trees and mountains carry on / as though nature had not been conquered." With the slight turn of phrase, "as though," the poem takes on another layer of meaning, highlighting the vulnerability of the land, moving from scene to significance. Yet the final lines call the reader back to the always central materiality of place: "the grass depends towards evening / and the little scalloped slates shine in the dusk."

Similarly, in "The Fertile Rock," as Cannon's lines attentively sketch a tidal scene, they simultaneously embed human life and history into the ocean's depth: "In May evening light / an exhausted silver ocean collapses./ It has carried so much to this island, / blue rope and teak beams, / dolphin skulls and fish boxes, / and once, a metal tank on wheels, / containing one cold passenger." In honoring the intertwined lives of dolphin, water, and human passenger, the poem eludes the false binaries of human and nonhuman life and then moves skillfully on to physicality of movement across the limestone strand: "It rises and collapses at the rim / rises and collapses again— / a mile of white, salt lace."

The limestone and the cairns of Ireland's West echo and linger throughout this volume, but the poetry of Handsalso honors international terrain, tracking the "decanted" sunlight upon "a single maple tree" in "Driving Back Over the Blue Ridge," the late morning sunrise in the high Pyrenees in "October," the "wild cherry trees on the hillside" near "the hermitage of Santa Eulalia" in "Farrera Light," or the "hulks of the Bauges" in "Night Road in the Mountains." And yet, though the actual landscapes of the poetry's imaginative impulse extend beyond Irish borders, the imaginative perception is not far removed from Cannon's historical place, as in "Harmonic Vases," in which a scene shifts from the acoustic design of the Collegiale Saint Martin to a cultural tradition in the cottages in County Clare where "an iron pot / was buried under the hearthstone / to give resonance to a dancer's step."

The sustained thread throughout the volume is Cannon's penchant to use perceptions of light as a tool of inquiry and discovery. Whether it is in the form of a moonbeam in "Hedgehog," the stove's fire in "Apple and Fire," or the sunset that turns the tree into a "red lamp" in "The Red Tree," Cannon's mindfulness to the presence of light is a connective refrain that propels the volume forward. And so, when she writes "I thought / only love could do it, / give us moments so complete / there is nothing behind us or before— / . . . but, sometimes, light can do it too," the reader is assured that she can trust the directives of luminosity in this poetry. This attention to light does not merely create a visual effect. Rather, in poems like "The Washing," it is the force that connects...