Bunting's Honey - Moya Cannon

A Poetry Book Society RecommendationThis is a book of wonderings and wanderings. Many of the wanderings are on familiar territory explored on foot, the hills of Wicklow and of the Burren in Co. Clare, the shorelines of Dublin Bay, of North West Donegal, of Galway, Achill and the Aran Islands. Other poems bring us farther afield, to a French village on the banks of the Saône, to the Venetian Island of Torcello, to a sacred mountain lake in China. In these poems there is an alertness to the palimpsest of lives, human and non-human, lived in these places and the mystery of each individual life. The poems bear witness to our primal kinship with the natural world, a source of nourishment, joy and solace, but also to our disastrous, onrushing human conquest of that same earth and seas. The poem ‘Bunting’s Honey’ is a tribute not only to those who composed and played early Irish harp music but also to those who collected the music and who, long after their own deaths, made possible a most remarkable renaissance of that same musical tradition. Similarly, ‘The Glance’, a meditation on Giovanni Bellini’s astonishing painting of a Madonna in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, is a gasp of wonder at how tenderness and trepidation can be conveyed by pigment and brush across five centuries. ‘A Technology’ explores the quantum leap of literacy in allowing us, after so many millennia of human existence, to communicate det
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