Moya Cannon's Sheep: Trust and Manipulation

Here are two poems by Moya Cannon that I just found and do admire:


SHEEP AT NIGHT IN THE INAGH VALLEY

For Leo and Clare

Maybe the dry margins draw them,
or grass, sprouting among limestone chippings --
they are here, as always,
on the edge of the tarmac
on a bend.

They shelter under the clumped rushes --
white bundles in the night --
their eyes are low green stars,
caught in the trawl of my car's headlights.

Occasionally one hirples across the road
but, usually, they stay put
and gaze at the slowed-down car.

I envy them their crazy trust.


WEANING

He carried a lamb
up over the bog to the hill,
took sugar from his pocket and let it lick.

The clean tongue searched the crevices of his hand,
then he set it down to graze.

It would never stray from that hill,
tethered by a dream of sweet grass.

--by MOYA CANNON


Respectfully borrowed from
Carrying the Songs
Carcanet Press Ltd
Manchester, UK
2007

Lighting By Bushmills -- And Brendan Kennelly

Self-Portrait #52.

"We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel.  Out of that same selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood.  The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry.  (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.)"

--Brendan Kennelly, from his Islandman,
quoted in his Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
which I'm excerpted, respectfully, here, among other places in this blog.

I've felt like an Islandman, an enisled "selfstone", and I have wanted others to feel like islandmen or personae too, though I certainly didn't quite have the words for it until this passage from Kennelly.

Three Coins from Guy Davenport

I love Guy Davenport's fine collection of critical essays: The Geography of the Imagination.  He had such a breadth and depth of knowledge, literary and humane, that he was able to bring to bear at a moment's notice, or so it feels, time and again.  Many of the essays began as lectures, composed while Davenport walked from his house to the university.  I wish I'd been in more than a few of those classes.

Here, I just want to share three quotations plucked almost at random from that fine book.

"Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed."

--from "Another Odyssey"


"Plutarch in the first structuralist study of myth, Isis and Osiris, demonstrates that there is no one way of telling the tales of the tribe. A myth is a pattern, not a script."

-- from "That Faire Field of Enna"



"Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow's blood."

--from "Finding"