Throughout her career, Moya Cannon has remained committed to the exploration of natural environments not only of her native Donegal but also other places like the Iberian peninsula or North America. Full of perceptiveness and formal acumen, her evocations of land – and seascapes as well as animals – have won her critical plaudits. Typically praised for her “attunement to the natural world, an ecologically centered perspective content to value nature for its own sake” (Potts 2009: 143-44), expressed in poems like “First Poetry” (Cannon 2007: 17) or “Aubade” (Cannon 2007: 47), Cannon has delineated a whole new ground of how ecopoetry can foster a productive relationship between language, music and the material world that can build the grounds for intercultural and interspecies communication. In “First Poetry”, the speaker identifies “swallows, terns, or grey-lag goose” as possibly “the original poetry” (2007: 47). And yet, unlike in the classic Romantic trope of the bird, a skylark or a nightingale, representing an ideal of song that the poet can aspire to but can never reach, for Cannon the birds are firmly rooted in the natural world, their movement and song “in tune with the lift and fall of the seasons” (2007: 17). As such, they are more of a model than an unattainable ideal for the poet, who remains sensitive to their presence. In this respect, her work shares some affinity with Paula Meehan in that “both poets equally exhibit clear senses of self-awareness and humility in their linguistic exercises upon human and non-human environments” (Flannery 2018: 84). However, whereas Meehan views the operations of language and of nature as predicated on a dynamic between permanence and change, Cannon’s poetry shows that poetic language, which she often associates with music, is rooted in the natural world through its sonic organisation. Thus, the present essay sets out to demonstrate that by investigating the relationship between song, language and material environments, she seeks not only to express the mystery of nature but also to embody it in the construction of her verse. Yeats, whom Cannon regards as one of the principal influences on her verse, observed in a letter written less than a month before his death that “Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it” (Yeats 1954: 922). While he meant the truth of a person’s life, Cannon seeks to embody, through her poems’ semantic and sonic organisation, the truth of the human enmeshment in the natural environment.

Mindful of Cannon’s keenness to approach even the minutest of living beings and elements of landscape with respect, Christine Cusick argues that her poetry “enacts an ethics of active humility with the natural world, focusing on the relationship as a process involving both knowledge of the natural world and a surrendering to its elusiveness” (2005: 62). She then points out that Cannon’s poems “evoke complex interactions of natural being and human knowing” (2005: 62). And yet, “central to these considerations […] is [her] poetic emphasis on both the power and inadequacy of language as a means of access to the layers of the material natural world” (Cusick 2005: 63). On the one hand it is poetic language that “give[s] shape to a connection with the landscape”; on the other, though, at a purely denotative level, it fails to grasp the mysterious depth of nature, which causes the poet to maintain “a deep sense of wonder and respect for the natural world in which we dwell” (Gilsenan Nordin 2010: 246-47). Instead of being awestruck into mute veneration of the surrounding world, she probes into the landscapes of western Ireland in what Luci Collin calls “a process of excavation”, whereby “the poems perform reconstruction of the Irish identity in a movement that interblends space, time, and historical fractures” (Collin 2016: 162). Part of this reconstruction assumes that identity is formed not only through interpersonal relationships and one’s positioning within the history of the nation but also through one’s connection to the land and animals that one shares this land with.

Relying on the writings of Rosi Braidotti, Eóin Flannery argues that Cannon’s poetry evidences an optimistic view of posthumanism, which emphasises “a more positive dimension to [the Anthropocene] in the sense of reconfiguring the relationship to our complex habitat” (2018: 72). For Braidotti, we are better equipped cognitively and affectively to face up to our enmeshment in the networks of nature (2013: 161). Thus, Flannery claims, “rather than labour and document the litanies of deleterious social, ecological, and climatic effects of anthropogenic factors, Cannon’s work is enabling and exemplary precisely in the […] sense delineated by Braidotti” (2018: 72). An insight into Cannon’s worldview equally pertinent to that of posthumanism comes from the last writings of Bruno Latour, who argues that we need to abandon the view of the earth as separate from ourselves and accept that we are part of what he calls the Terrestrial, a non-holistic, anti-systematic collection of agents, which “is not only external but also internal; it is not universal, but local; it is neither overanimated nor deanimated” (2017: 183). Latour argues that the reorientation of the vector of our thinking toward the Terrestrial entails a rejection of the discrete ideas of “nature”, “human kind” or “society”, all of which stem from an outdated worldview that fails to acknowledge the diversity of agentive forces constitutive of the earth. This entails the jettisoning of the optics focused on the system of production and shifting attention to the system of engendering that

is not interested in producing goods, for humans, on the basis of resources, but in engendering terrestrials – not just humans, but all terrestrials. It is based on the idea of cultivating attachments, operations that are all the more difficult because animate beings are not limited by frontiers and are constantly overlapping, embedding themselves within one another. (Latour 2018: 83)

According to Latour, as well as Braidotti but also scholars as diverse as Donna Haraway or Jane Bennett, the key to a more environmentally-aware future society is the recognition that we are enmeshed in the ever-increasing collection of actors and as such constitute the environments in which we dwell.

It is in the sense of sharing the world with non-human others that Cannon’s poems are rooted in the idea of the Terrestrial, for in her work she embraces the view of the planet as a multiagential network. Donna Potts points up this aspect of Cannon’s work, when she observes that, in a poem like “Thirst in the Burren” that conjures an image of the “white hills” being home to ferns and humans alike (Cannon 2007: 57), “Cannon obliquely attributes to the landscape a kind of consciousness that corresponds with that of humans” (2018: 48). Elsewhere Potts links this posthumanist, Latourian perspective with ethics, taking her cue from Cannon’s recent “Poem for St. Brigid’s Day: A Song at Imbolc” and its imploring address to the earth that it “teach us again, before it grows too late, / your neglected, painstaking arts of nature and of care” (Cannon 2020). According to Potts, in the poem, Cannon gives one of her most direct expressions of the “ecological ethic of care, a recognition and celebration of the human interdependence with nonhuman nature, by means of which we hope to keep the song of the earth alive” (2021: 51). And yet, in Cannon’s poems, this enmeshment of the human and the non-human, both of which collectively constitute the networks of the Terrestrial, is more than a notional situatedness of the speaker. For she emphasises that the connecting elements are language and music by means of which we are rooted in the material world.

In spite of her preoccupation with what language is and how it works, Cannon has taken a rather dim view of the implications of radical textualism like that championed by Richard Rorty, who asserts that “truth is made rather than found”, adding that “what is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences” (1989: 7). For Rorty, any suggestion that there are truths outside language is a vestige of essentialism that characterised cultures that sought redemption either through monotheistic religions that relied on finding “a new relation to a supremely powerful non-human person” or through pre-Romantic philosophy that believed that redemption “would consist in acquiring a set of beliefs that represent things in the one way they truly are” (Rorty 2007: 91). These two cultural formations have been supplanted by what Rorty calls literary culture, in which redemption is to come from reading, for in this way one redeems oneself from egotist presumption “through making acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible” (2007: 91). In his view, therefore, thinkers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein as well as their heirs Derrida and Donald Davidson have demonstrated the contingency of truth and its inextricability from the language in which it is conveyed.

It is the idea of truth as relative to language, however, that Cannon has balked at, observing early on that she “found it exceedingly difficult to live with the implication that truth was relative and temporary” (Cannon 2001: 131). Ironically, in lieu of assuming some form of extra-linguistic perspective, as do ecocritics like Lawrence Buell scathing of textualist and deconstructive criticism, she opposes the tenet of textualism on the grounds that it relies on a simplistic view of language:

It was the felt evidence of language – something in the very timbre or timber of language, its rings of usage and growth – which afforded some reassurance to the contrary. There was a truth in the resonance of certain words – bread, water, fire, love – evidence of a shared humanity, shared need, shared desires, shared delight. (Cannon 2001: 131).

Similarly to Derek Mahon, who rejects what he terms critical theory that for him fails to appreciate the semantic and acoustic density of words,^[1] Cannon sees language not as a system of floating signifiers that have only contingent and historically changing connection to signifieds but as a palpable, embodied presence. Part of this palpability, she observes, stems from the fact that “the evocative power of any word is a function of the sum of all the remembered uses of that word” (Cannon 2011: 10). Although she fails to appreciate that the truth resonating in certain words’ genealogic richness can also be viewed as formed through historical contingency, Cannon’s claim does correct the textualist insistence on language being no more than a game of difference and deferral. The importance of her insight, however, lies less in the adherence to the notion of truth and more in her emphasis on the “timbre and timber” of language in that the sonic texture of words, at least the way she employs them in her verse, points to a certain tangible, albeit elusive, presence in the medium. While it cannot be captured in a single word or phrase, this presence can be tracked in an image, for “what is stated is usually less important than what is evoked” (Cannon 2020: 12).

Cannon suggests that the distinction between naming a thing and evoking it is what constitutes the special feature of poetry. She derives her understanding of poetic language from, among others, Pound’s early delineation of three “kinds of poetry”: melopoeia, “wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning”; fanopoeia, “which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination” and logopoeia, “‘the dance of the intellect among words’, that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play” (1968: 25). Although for Pound there is a clear hierarchy between the three, with logopoeia representing poetry of the highest order, Cannon takes the three as suggesting a view of verse as built of semantic content that is historically motivated (Pound’s “habits of usage” and the context along with its concomintants, acceptances and ironical play) and musically arranged. What a poem evokes is the image inflected through the music of the language employed for its construction. Cannon finds examples of such compositional mastery in, for example, Patrick Kavanagh, in whose best poems she asserts “the music and the imagery conspire to persuade us of the argument” (2009: 192).

Thus, according to Cannon, what distinguishes evocation from denotation is the former’s joint attention to sound and meaning. Her emphasis on the sonic features of poetic language has led Potts to situate Cannon’s poetry in the context of ecomusicology, a science that “examines the ways in which music and ecology are related and how music reflects, relates to, or relies on nature” (2021: 35). And yet, Potts’ invocation of ecomusicology does not take on board its theoretical toolkit that is utilised by music theoreticians to “study how sound worlds and musical practices can reflect, inform, create, and structure societies” and, in effect, contribute to enhancing the general ecological awareness (Allen 2011: 415). Instead, she limits her readings to commenting on the various evocations of song and music throughout Cannon’s oeuvre. However, Cannon’s poems do not just reference music in the context of nature’s soundscapes but rather music and song underlie her idea of poetic language as inextricably intertwined with material nature. This, in turn, reveals poetic language, the combination of sound and sense, as a means whereby we can explore our rootedness in the earth. This rootedness manifests itself on the one hand in how music mediated through poetry communicates the language of nature and, on the other, how this communication can work outside the confines of semantics and reason.

As far as music’s interlinkage with nature is concerned, “Sympathetic Vibration” is a programmatic poem. It opens with a quotation from an unnamed octogenarian, who instructs the speaker “You never strike a note, / you always take the note” (Cannon 2007: 80, emphasis in original). The order of linguistic correctness is here contrasted with what might be termed, harking back to Cannon’s comment about truth in language, felt correctness. While “strike a note” is the prescribed collocation in the musical context, with another possibility “hit a note” being equally suggestive of conflict, the speaker is told that “take” is indeed the more appropriate choice given how it connects an auditory mindfulness of the surroundings (as in “taking note”) with humility, as though following a score is an act of accepting a gift. Additionally, whereas the indefinite article implies imprecision or lack of prior knowledge, “the note” is indicative of a shared domain where the giver and recipient are both cognizant of the import of what is bestowed.

This significance of the distinction between the two types of correctness is thematised at length in “Murdering the Language”, where the speaker realises that “victories won in blood are fastened in grammar / and in grammar’s dream of order” (Cannon 2007: 88). The context of England’s conquest of Ireland comes to the fore, as the colonisation of the island, first undertaken by military force, was carried out through the suppression of Irish in favour of English. And yet, the poem discovers that while the “correct language is spoken only in the capital”, she and her people have developed their own idiom: “Our language was tidal; / it flipped the shale cliffs” and “ran up the beaches, over sand, seaweed, stones” (Cannon 2007: 88). In contrast to the abstracted “analysis of a sentence lifted out of talk” (Cannon 2007: 88), the speaker’s “tidal language” develops in close touch with the natural space which it is being used to invoke. The poem thus implies that dwelling in a place is tantamount to dwelling in a language in that the two inform each other: the landscape determines the mutations of the idiom and simultaneously the idiom shapes the perception of the landscape. Furthermore, Cannon suggests that whereas the grammatically correct language is dead insofar as it is impervious to change and, as a result, can now be subject to “neat examination” (Cannon 2007: 88), the spoken idiom is a living tongue, whose ebb and flow parallels the motions of nature, adopting “a new, less brutal grammar” (Cannon 2007: 88). The “tidal language” is an ephemeral talk rather than a sentence fixed in writing and as such develops in connection to the land and sea. In this sense, it works just like music in “Sympathetic Vibration”: “Music, the dark tender secret of it, / is locked into the wood of every tree” so that “No stroke or blade can release [it]”, only “hands, informed by years of patient love, / can come to know the hidden rhythms of the wood” (Cannon 2007: 80). The “dark tender secret” locked in a tree, music is here conceived as being at one with nature. This is a stunning insight, for the poem fuses materiality and aurality into a single mode. In the process, space and time are conflated, setting up an image of eternity gathered into a single instant, the time that it takes for a single note to sound out.

This idea is reinforced in the third stanza, in which the speaker suggests that music is a “salve to ease the world’s wounds” but also

tells and, modulating, retells

the story of our own groping roots,

of the deep sky from which they retreat

and, in retreating, reach –

the tree’s great symphony of leaf. (Cannon 2007: 80)

The “tell-retell” pair echoes Paula Meehan’s “The Patternings”, which also thematises the connection between the mutability of nature and the differential processes at play in language: “I sketch the patternings of the sea: / the iter- and reiteration / of event. Similar; not the same” (Meehan 2016: 16). Using an analogy to painting, “the short opening stanza suggests that the process of sketching is an endlessly repeated attempt at capturing “the patternings of the sea”, an effort that can only exist in the realm of “reiteration” that gestures to Derrida’s notion of ‘iterability’ understood as the ‘necessary possibility that any meaningful item of language will remain meaningful through its repetition across context;’” the idea of language as “iterable” underlies Meehan’s poem, in which, despite the fact that “she capitalizes ‘Similarities’, the speaker of ‘The Patternings’ recognizes differences inherent in each futile attempt to sketch the sea” (Pietrzak 2019: 69).

While Cannon also points to the constant changeability of inherently metamorphic nature, unlike Meehan, she creates a closed image in the sense that the music first “tells and, modulating, retells” of “our own groping roots”, which, in turn, “retreat” from the sky and “in retreating, reach” the tree, which is the source of the music. This circularity is enacted by parallel clauses – tell-modulating-retell and retreat-retreating-reach – both of which underscore the completion of the music and story. The closed circuit, however, is no mechanistic eternal recurrence but rather a cycle pulsating with life, its mysterious “hidden rhythms”. This “great symphony of leaf” is thus a piece in celebration of the gift of life, which cannot be ripped from nature, only taken as a gift. But then the music that the poem invokes is also the music of its verses, as the cadence of the poem reinforces the idea that the cycle of life is a paradoxical, perpetually changing constant. While the opening two lines are in iambic trimeter, the subsequent stanzas modulate the rhythm, keeping it, however, within the confines of iambic-trochaic inversion, as though to suggest contrapuntal progression. The second stanza begins with a trochaic trimeter to counterpoint the three iambs in the first two lines, then the subsequent lines feature longer sequences of stressed-unstressed modulations. The sonic effect is one of growth and depletion or breathing in and out, until the penultimate stanza reaches the peak of iambic-trochaic tetra- and pentameter followed by a crescendo of three following stresses in “tree’s great symphony”, which create an incantatory cadence. Thus, it appears that the sonic construction of the poem alludes to the unfolding of the symphonic score, which in its classical iteration follows the pattern of exposition (the poem’s opening two lines in iambic trimeter), development (the inversion of the first three feet of the third line), recapitulation (the last two feet of the third line that follow trochee-iamb pattern), transition (the fourth line’s return to the iambic rhythm but this time with two stresses instead of one) (“Symphony”). Adopting this association, the “tree’s great symphony” seems to unite the first two movements in that the phrase retains the iambic rhythm with the inclusion of what Derek Attridge calls implied offbeats^[2] but also it develops the initial cadence by moving it up in pitch. While this is not meant as a definitive mapping out of the poem’s acoustic contour onto the pattern of symphony, the sonic texture of the verses does highlight the correlation between language and music. In effect, the connection between matter and music extends to include language as well.

Cannon develops the connection throughout her oeuvre. In “Timbre”, which explores the association of timbre and timber that she picked up on in the above-quoted interview, words are compared to tools that are “carried about the ways something essential, / a blade, say, or a bowl, / is brought from here to there when there is work to be done” (Cannon 2007: 15). Again, however, the violent utility of words, often in the service of conquerors and colonisers, is contrasted with music: “after the timber has been sawn / rough rings release the song of the place” (Cannon 2007: 15). Timber is the seat of timbre, a connection implied already in the homophonic relation of the two. The acoustic contour of the poem further reinforces the contrast in that whereas the first stanza features a more relaxed, prosaic rhythm in its long lines, the concluding verses attract attention to their sound, featuring alliteration and the same increase in pitch that appeared in the key moment of “Sympathetic Vibration”, as “rough rings release” and “droughts, good summers” both bring in three stresses in quick succession only alleviated by the implied offbeats. As a result, the closing lines of “Timber” suggest a powerful insurgence of sound, as though the sawn tree has actually released its “song of the place”, its “pain and joy” gathered in “a voice” (Cannon 2007: 15).

Nature’s capacity to harbour music in its physical body is evoked in Cannon’s later volumes too. In “Reed-Making”, from Hands (2011), she conjures a similar idea to that of “Sympathetic Vibration”. The poem begins with a description of pipe-making, whose lips, if “played in / by a fine musician”, “will come to vibrate in sympathy, / and all things will flow through them” (2011: 10). Just like in the earlier poem, this sympathetic vibration is enacted on the sonic level, as the speaker maintains a stress-unstress rhythmic contour that unfolds by alternating between iambic and trochaic verses. Each line varies in length, growing and shortening as though to imply that breathing in the pipe. The careful attention devoted to the construction of what appears to be a simple instrument leads to the question in the final stanza: “What generates music?”. In lieu of an answer, though, the poem ends with a juxtaposition of the images of a child blowing “a grass blade held between two thumbs” and “wind blow[ing] across the holes in a hollow steel gate” (Cannon 2011: 10). Whether it is a masterfully assembled violin or a mere pipe, music is shown to come not from a fastidiously fashioned instrument but from the joint effort of many actants. This can be a man piping or a child blowing a grass blade, or indeed the wind surging in the holes of a gate. This idea is derived from Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”, in which the lute’s strings, swept by the wind, emit “the long sequacious notes” that “Over delicious surges sink and rise” (Coleridge 1974: 52, l. 19). For Coleridge, this ceaseless motion represents “Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere” (Coleridge 1974: 52, l. 29) and this idea lies also at the core of Cannon’s perception of music as a source of “joyance” at the rhythmical comingling of all things. This connection goes beyond intelligibility and reason, as Cannon puts it in “Night Road in the Mountains”:

We do not know,

we do not understand

how five bows,

drawn across five sets of strings

by gifted, joyous hands, can trace

the back roads of our hearts[.] (Cannon 2011: 63)

The image of “joyous hands” simultaneously stresses the individual, subconscious agency and the need for connection in that the hands achieve nothing on their own but require the “five sets of strings” to tap into spiritual depth at the heart of things.

Coleridgean in spirit, “Glencolmcille Soundtrack”, from Donegal Tarantella (2019), connects music to light in an image of perfect serenity found in the coastal landscape, where the poet finds a moment of respite amid “May’s soundtrack” that comprises “bee-hum, the high meheh of hill-lambs, / the lifted songs of larks in warm grass” and “the cuckoo’s shameless call” (2019: 29, emphasis in original). The speaker cannot help but wonder how we can fail to attend to this symphony of fauna and flora, “How did we forget it, / mislay or roll it up?” (Cannon 2019: 29). This harks back to Derek Mahon’s attack on the deafening din of the capitalist machine in a poem like “Blueprint”, in which “Trucks from New Jersey (fruit and veg)” come “panting beneath the window ledge” and keep “drowning out the twitter-cheep / of sparrows on the firs escape” (Mahon 2010: 15). However, unlike Mahon, who desires some solitary refuge from the thought-defeating hustle and bustle of modernity where he might enter into pensive silence, Cannon discovers the mirthful song of the earth, in which animals and the sea join in with the undulating grasses and shimmering leaves to produce this intricate “tapestry of sound” (Cannon 2019: 29).

In “Where Is Music Stored”, Cannon suggests that what we have abandoned is the animal part of our selves. The poem is structured as an answer to the question posed in the title and some of the considerations include the suggestion that music might lie “in a small corner / of the human brain, / the bird’s brain” or perhaps it is “hoarded / in the muscles and sinews / of human hands and arms, / of a human throat” which is “a bird’s throat”, yet another possibility is that it is hidden “in the stone and silver throat, / of a mountain rivulet?” (Cannon 2019: 32). Instead of the definitive answer, though, the speaker moves on to evoke the image of a musician who plays a tune “she hasn’t played for years” but finds that her “brain cells call up mathematical patterns” and “a tune starts to flow, / to find form, clear and quick, / in the vibrating air” (Cannon 2019: 32). The vibrations allude to the “sympathetic vibration” of the concerted endeavour that is the music of the earth. There is no distinction here between human craft or birds’ sublime skill or the seeming silence of a mountain, for each offers its own tune to the unfolding song. Once more, then, the role assigned to the human is to humbly and mindfully “take the note” and so “permit us to share / our unworded joy, yearning, despair” (Cannon 2019: 32).

The insistence on music’s prelinguistic capacity to convey emotions and ideas makes its association with poetry problematic in view of the fact that poems rely on semantics to a far greater degree than tunes. And yet, Cannon insists that the meaning of words is at best only a half of what a poem evokes, being a construct of sound and sense. This special quality of poetry allows it to explore what words cannot grasp, like in “Starlings”, which opens with the admission that “Some things can’t be caught in words, / starlings over October river, for instance” (Cannon 2007: 26). The sonic contours of her poems, the intricate orchestration of iambic and trochaic rhythms, supplement the denotative layer by creating an auditory context for the evocations. As a result of this rootedness of words in nature’s material being, Cannon’s poems on the one hand indicate that it is through language that we can investigate the mystery of the landscapes that we are steeped in. On the other hand, however, by virtue of the connection of language with the earth through the verses’ sonic enactment of the natural processes, her poems reveal poetry as a means of instantiating our enmeshment in the ecosystems we dwell in.

Notes

[1] Mahon regards what he calls postmodernism and critical theory as ancillaries to “neo-con con trick facilitating ‘ethically neutral’ open markets” and insisting on language as a vacuous play of signifiers deprived of signifieds (2014: 94).

[2] Attridge observes that poetic rhythm depends on the reader’s perception and subsequent enactment of “the repeated alteration of a stronger pulse and a fixed number of weaker pulses, usually one or two” (1982: 77). He then goes on to show that the stronger pulse, the stressed syllable of phonology, may realise a beat in poetry, while one or two unstressed syllables may realise what he calls an offbeat. There are cases when a stressed syllable in a word doesn’t realise a beat in a poem (this is denoted by the term demotion) or conversely, when an unstressed word (often a preposition) does realise it (promotion). Additionally, “when one of [two] unstressed syllables has a vowel which tends to disappear in pronunciation, and thereby lose its rhythmic force as syllable, the result is more like a single offbeat than a double one” (Attridge 1982: 163). However, among his most valuable insights is the delineation of an implied offbeat, which may occur between stressed syllables as in Milton’s “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit thereof” or Shakespeare’s “I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins”. In the first example, the beats realised by “man’s” and “first” are separated by a brief pause, similarly to what happens between “fear” and “thrills” in Shakespeare (1982: 174-75).