Eigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival - The Word and the Melody

Poets Moya Cannon and Sean Lysaght will be joined on stage by string quartet Capriccio for a magical evening of words and music. This event is in memory of the much-loved Sheila O’Regan, a member of this year’s organising committee, who died in April.

Moya Cannon’s Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2021) brings together poems from six previous books, 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.

She was born and grew up in Co. Donegal, Ireland, spent most of her adult life in Galway and now lives in Dublin.

In her poems, history, archaeology, pre-historic art, geology and music figure as gateways to deeper understanding of our mysterious relationship with the natural world and with our past.

She has been a recipient of the Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award and was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Villanova. She is a member of Aosdána.