“Sympathetic Vibrations”: Music, Language and Ecology in the Poetry of Moya Cannon

The essay focuses on the poetry of Moya Cannon and her idea of poetic language as a link between people and the material environment in which they dwell. Throughout her oeuvre, Cannon shows that poetic language, which she often associates with music, is rooted in nature through its sonic organisation. 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, through her poems’ semantic and prosodic contours, to inscribe it in the construction of her verse.