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.

An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. 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 immediacy of our response to the beauty of our exploited planet inspire many of Moya Cannon's poems. The perfection of very early cave art she sees as testimony to the centrality of art in our evolution as humans. Geology, archaeology, history and music figure as gateways to a deeper understanding of our relationship with our past and the natural world. 'Whatever inspiration is,' she quotes Wislawa 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 regards herself as fortunate in having 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.

Moya Cannon's new collection reaches back into the long past, showing how traces left behind - textile fragments, buried thimbles, cave paintings - enable us to make imaginative connections with our distant ancestors, emphasising the commonalities of human lives lived many centuries apart. At the heart of the book is the vital importance of art, as the means by which we give permanence to the fleeting moments of our lives; and our need for a connection to the natural world, even in the most mechanised of modern environments. As the train conductor in the title poem asserts, '"I'm going to get a T-shirt with / Keats Lives on it. This time of year, [ - ] when everything starts coming green again, / I always think of him - "'.

This sixth collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.

Mapping the changes that have occurred in Irish literature over the past fifty years, this volume includes twenty-one writers, poets, and playwrights from the North and South of Ireland, who tell their own stories. They are funny, tragic, angry, philosophical, but all are vivid personal accounts of their experiences as women writing during a pivotal period in the history of Ireland. With a foreword by Martina Devlin, and an introduction by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, the anthology includes essays by Cherry Smyth, Mary Morrissy, Lia Mills, Moya Cannon, Aine Ni Ghlinn, Catherine Dunne, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Mary O'Donnell, Mary O'Malley, Ruth Carr, Evelyn Conlon, Anne Devlin, Ivy Bannister, Sophia Hillan, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Dorcey, Celia de Freine, Mairide Woods, Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, and Phyl Herbert.