Please join us to celebrate the launch of Bunting’s Honey by Moya Cannon, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

The reading will be hosted by Vincent Woods. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

This 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 details, not only of our outer lives, but also of our inner thoughts to those not immediately in our presence. ‘Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing’ considers the empowerments of literacy and the limitations imposed on that empowerment. There are other wonderings, not least the horrors of the wars of the twenty-first century, and the need to find a way to somehow set aside fear and difference and to give peace and tenderness a chance.

About the speakers:

Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with six previous collections. In 2021 Carcanet published her Collected Poems. She was born and grew up in Co. Donegal, received a BA in History and Politics from University College, Dublin, and an MPhil in International Relations from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A recipient of the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and of the O’Shaughnessy Award, she was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University and in 2004 was elected to Áosdána, the affiliation of Irish creative artists.

Vincent Woods is a writer and broadcaster. His plays include ‘At the Black Pig’s Dyke’ and ‘A Cry from Heaven’. Poetry collections are ‘The Colour of Language’, ‘Lives and Miracles’ and ‘Borderlines’, with Henry Glassie. With Eva Bourke he co-edited ‘Fermata: Writings Inspired by Music’; and with Australian poet Colleen Burke co-edited ‘The Turning Wave: Poems and Songs of Irish Australia’. He also edited ‘Leaves of Hungry Grass: Poetry and Ireland’s Great Famine’ as part of the Famine Folio series for Quinnipiac University, He wrote the libretto for Gavin Bryars’ composition ‘Wittgenstein Fragments’ premiered by Louth Contemporary Music Society. He has written several song lyrics and performed with many musicians and singers. His radio series The County Measure was broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. Vincent is director of the Iron Mountain Literature Festival in Leitrim. He lives in Dublin and is a member of Aosdána.