Review by Colin Dardis of "Bunting’s Honey" by Moya Cannon

A persistent theme is the danger of forgetting, of lost words and times. "And Now The Babies" laments that "no one can figure out again, | how to give peace a chance." In "Planting Roses in Baicheng," set in the Chinese city that has seen its fair share of border changes over the years, an old, local woman contemplates as "a witness from inside history" and wonders about her history. This pondering on the past is built upon in "All Gone," a key poem in the collection, which recognises the evanescent nature of family events:

          And a century later
         hardly anyone remembers this
         nor do they really matter,
         the trillions of family stories
         which, every day, drift down
         a billion rivulets
         into Lethe’s indifferent waters.

The collection’s title poem celebrates Edward Bunting, famed for his work in collecting and notating Irish folk music. The reader can’t help but draw a comparison here between Bunting and Cannon, the latter collecting stories in her poems that otherwise would be lost, from Tyrone villages to the River Saōne to Venice to Jilin Province. In "Turlough Hill," Cannon notes that we will never truly learn of the history of the site "because nobody wrote | nobody will ever know." Cannon excels in letting us know of hidden wonders, of human adventures and pastoral splendours, and it is from within nature that some of the strongest poems arise.

The opening section of the collection is a series of eco-poems, ablaze with appreciations for scenery and wildlife. However, there are notes of warning. In "Die-back," the poet warns us that

          A species, even, can disappear discreetly,
          with no official count-down,
          without the drama
          of an asteroid or an ice-age

Similarly, in "For the Birds," we learn of pigeon flocks that had "darkened America’s skies," reduced to the last of its year dying "imprisoned, in a Cincinnati zoo." Cannon’s eco-poems are a standout of the collection. In the thrall of nature, greeted by a vision of lake and sky, Cannon wryly notes a crowd of spectators jostling "closer to a roped cliff edge | where a hundred smartphones are held aloft." Contrast this with the poet’s own discovery of a corrie lake in "A Quarrel with the Lexiographers," noting her how "heart leaps" amidst the "skree and heather"; Cannon’s experience feels realer, void of the prism of technology. Indeed, in a poem titled "A Technology," Cannon charts the history and advancement of typesetting, but frets if "a millennium from now | will anyone, perchance, survive" to read our current "cacophony" of "whirring symbols."

In "Pascal," the poem opens with a quote from the French physicist: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." Cannon wonders "what lies | beyond the rim of a universe"; such contemplation of the expanse of existence is amusing, given that Pascal also famously wrote "All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone." And yet these poems, contrastingly, make the reader want to go outside and explore a mountainside or watch a sunrise, and revel in "that honeycomb of hours spent laughing and talking" in human contact. Although there are notes of sadness and grief, these poems are so rich in the celebration of nature and connection that the reader is enlivened, even emboldened, at the collection’s end. In "Old Friend," fittingly the closing poem, we are reminded that there will be "nothing left of us in this world | but what we have remembered to give away." With these poems, Cannon has ensured that what she leaves behind adds to the beauty of the world.

About the reviewer
Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist, his work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and the US. He co-hosts the long-running open mic poetry night, Purely Poetry, in Belfast, and is editor of the Poem Alone blog.