{"id":5113,"date":"2015-10-25T13:37:23","date_gmt":"2015-10-25T12:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5113"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:37:25","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:37:25","slug":"moya-cannon-keats-lives-carcanet-9-99-reviewed-by-annie-muir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5113","title":{"rendered":"Moya Cannon, Keats Lives<\/em> (Carcanet) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Annie Muir"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just as Keats himself is more famous for his untimely death than the events of his life, Keats Lives<\/i> is a book primarily concerned with the continuance of lives after death.<\/p>\n

Published this year, Cannon\u2019s fifth collection of poetry begins with a sonnet: \u2018Winter View from Binn Bhrioc\u00e1in<\/i>\u2019. The title immediately presents a highly symbolic English lyric subject \u2013 Winter. Keats\u2019s \u2018The Human Seasons\u2019, which goes through all the seasons by their symbolic importance, ends on the final couplet:<\/p>\n

He has his winter too of pale misfeature,
\nOr else he would forgo his mortal nature.<\/p>\n

In the title-poem, \u2018Keats Lives\u2019, the train-conductor, who tells the speaker that he always thinks of Keats \u2018at this time of year\u2019, is referencing the Spring of \u2018Endymion\u2019. But although we see glimpses of spring in this poem, and other such as \u2018Primavera\u2019, 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 \u2018mortal nature\u2019 of one life, but celebrates the continuity of \u2018the myriad lives\u2019:<\/p>\n

of humans and of trout,
\nof stonechats and sea-sedges<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Do the sums\u2019, the speaker asks:<\/p>\n

why am I so astounded
\nto find myself over fifty,
\nat least half of my life gone.<\/p>\n

This is, as the train-conductor calls one of Keats\u2019s lines, \u2018a bombshell\u2019. It is the first, and one of the only truly personal statements of the book, which doesn\u2019t even feature an \u2018I\u2019 until the seventh poem. By positioning this poem \u2018half\u2019 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 \u2018I\u2019 of the speaker and the \u2018I\u2019 of the reader who has been imperatively addressed by the title.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the book\u2019s title refers not to Keats himself but to a slogan t-shirt that the Keats-fan-train-conductor wants to \u2018get\u2019. This t-shirt is the kind of thing these poems are interested with, not \u2018mortal\u2019 life but objects that speak of life: shrines left on the roadside after an accident (\u2018Shrines\u2019),\u2018summit cairn[s]\u2019 (Winter View), and the \u2018small things\u2019 found in museums that \u2018survive inundations\u2019 (Four Thimbles).<\/p>\n

In \u2018Finger-fluting in Moon-milk\u2019 the speaker is a tourist looking at a historic object: \u2018in our open-topped toy train\/we are forbidden to touch it.\u2019 \u2018It\u2019 is a cave \u2018painted\/with long files of mammoths\/and gentle faced horses\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> fingerprints. But this is exactly what Cannon does:<\/p>\n

a woman, it seems, with a baby on her hip
\ntrailed her fingers down through
\nthe soft, white substance
\n[\u2026]
\nand the child copied her.
\nToday, the finger-flutings remain clear<\/p>\n

This yearning to touch the untouchable forced her to use her own hands to touch the \u2018soft, white substance\u2019 of the page and write a poem that casually inhabits the body of this woman, and allows us, like \u2018the child\u2019, to \u2018copy her\u2019 and touch it too.<\/p>\n

In this book, the idea of the anonymous person is more important than the subjective \u2018I\u2019 that historically adorns lyric poetry. In the sixth poem of the collection, \u2018Burial, Ardeche 20,000 BC\u2019, the word \u2018someone\u2019 is repeated four times, and in the next, \u2018In The Textile Museum\u2019, decicated to another M.Cannon, the first use of the first-person in the collection is used, and the \u2018someone\u2019 becomes \u2018I\u2019.<\/p>\n

But even here we are only introduced to the \u2018I\u2019 in relation to her mother, and her mother herself is defined by her possessions: her \u2018treadle sewing machine\u2019 and \u2018her good scissors\u2019, as well as \u2018her books of poetry\u2019. This comparison between clothes and words is shadowed in the final lines of the poem:<\/p>\n

Love slips easily through the eye of a needle,
\nwords clothe us;
\nnot everything ends up in a book.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And, the same way the \u2018words\u2019 that \u2018end[ed] up\u2019 in \u2018a book\u2019 of Keats\u2019s poem are a physical representation of the space between the \u2018African-American conductor\u2019 and the \u2018Dublin taxi-driver\u2019, and the teacher on the train, and me, and you, when you read them in Keats Lives<\/i>.
\n 
\nAnnie Muir<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s fifth collection of poetry begins with a sonnet: \u2018Winter View from Binn Bhrioc\u00e1in\u2019. The title immediately presents a highly symbolic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nMoya Cannon, Keats Lives (Carcanet) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Annie Muir - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5113\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Moya Cannon, Keats Lives (Carcanet) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Annie Muir - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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. 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