Just as Keats himself is more famous for his untimely death than the events of his life, Keats Lives is a book primarily concerned with the continuance of lives after death.
Published this year, Cannon’s fifth collection of poetry begins with a sonnet: ‘Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin’. The title immediately presents a highly symbolic English lyric subject – Winter. Keats’s ‘The Human Seasons’, which goes through all the seasons by their symbolic importance, ends on the final couplet:
He has his winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forgo his mortal nature.
In the title-poem, ‘Keats Lives’, the train-conductor, who tells the speaker that he always thinks of Keats ‘at this time of year’, is referencing the Spring of ‘Endymion’. But although we see glimpses of spring in this poem, and other such as ‘Primavera’, again and again Cannon brings us back to the snowy greyness of winter. Despite this, the sonnet that opens the book does not dwell on the inevitable death that defines the ‘mortal nature’ of one life, but celebrates the continuity of ‘the myriad lives’:
of humans and of trout,
of stonechats and sea-sedges
The winter of this poem is very much outside rather than in, and it sets up a book about looking outside at the other things in the world rather than dwelling on your own reflection. Later, in ‘Do the sums’, the speaker asks:
why am I so astounded
to find myself over fifty,
at least half of my life gone.
This is, as the train-conductor calls one of Keats’s lines, ‘a bombshell’. It is the first, and one of the only truly personal statements of the book, which doesn’t even feature an ‘I’ until the seventh poem. By positioning this poem ‘half’ way through the book itself, Cannon shows an alignment with the human speaker and the voice of her material creation – these words on this page number – which are themselves mid-point between the ‘I’ of the speaker and the ‘I’ of the reader who has been imperatively addressed by the title.
Similarly, the book’s title refers not to Keats himself but to a slogan t-shirt that the Keats-fan-train-conductor wants to ‘get’. This t-shirt is the kind of thing these poems are interested with, not ‘mortal’ life but objects that speak of life: shrines left on the roadside after an accident (‘Shrines’),‘summit cairn[s]’ (Winter View), and the ‘small things’ found in museums that ‘survive inundations’ (Four Thimbles).
In ‘Finger-fluting in Moon-milk’ the speaker is a tourist looking at a historic object: ‘in our open-topped toy train/we are forbidden to touch it.’ ‘It’ is a cave ‘painted/with long files of mammoths/and gentle faced horses’. Everyone can relate to this feeling of being forbidden to touch something: from the Christmas presents under the tree to the precious sparkly things behind glass in museums.
In this case, it also seems to relate to the concept of History: the tourists are not allowed to touch the historic item because it would be ruined if living people were to soil it with their fingerprints. But this is exactly what Cannon does:
a woman, it seems, with a baby on her hip
trailed her fingers down through
the soft, white substance
[…]
and the child copied her.
Today, the finger-flutings remain clear
This yearning to touch the untouchable forced her to use her own hands to touch the ‘soft, white substance’ of the page and write a poem that casually inhabits the body of this woman, and allows us, like ‘the child’, to ‘copy her’ and touch it too.
In this book, the idea of the anonymous person is more important than the subjective ‘I’ that historically adorns lyric poetry. In the sixth poem of the collection, ‘Burial, Ardeche 20,000 BC’, the word ‘someone’ is repeated four times, and in the next, ‘In The Textile Museum’, decicated to another M.Cannon, the first use of the first-person in the collection is used, and the ‘someone’ becomes ‘I’.
But even here we are only introduced to the ‘I’ in relation to her mother, and her mother herself is defined by her possessions: her ‘treadle sewing machine’ and ‘her good scissors’, as well as ‘her books of poetry’. This comparison between clothes and words is shadowed in the final lines of the poem:
Love slips easily through the eye of a needle,
words clothe us;
not everything ends up in a book.
Here, the clothes made by the mother act as a physical representation of the space between the mother and child, the same way the space for the fingers in a thimble bridges the gap between generations of thimble-users.
And, the same way the ‘words’ that ‘end[ed] up’ in ‘a book’ of Keats’s poem are a physical representation of the space between the ‘African-American conductor’ and the ‘Dublin taxi-driver’, and the teacher on the train, and me, and you, when you read them in Keats Lives.
Annie Muir