An Essex Parish
An Essex Parish is a sequence of poems that tell a story of murder and redemption, reflecting modern events against Essex's religious and violent Anglo-Saxon history.
This first collection by David Canning includes his mountain poems in The Eternal Mountain, which draws on his experiences as a climber and mountaineer, and in A History of the Troubles, he explores relationship, family, love and loss.
The Celestial Spheres
In this, his second collection, David Canning has assembled poems that reflect upon our inter-connectedness, and our search for the things that bring us significance, satisfaction or security.
Moving through themes of ambition, wisdom, inconstancy, war, love and spirituality, the poems recall Dante's celestial spheres, the crystalline globes into which the planets and stars were once thought to be fixed, and which it was believed invisibly influenced human affairs.
Bowland
The Forest of Bowland rests as the middle sibling between the more well known and visited Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District. It is no less beautiful, or fragile. This collection of poems, which includes Canning’s Gingko prize winner, The Bowland Sheep, is a love song to Bowland’s dramatic landscapes, moors, bogs, rainforest, and the people and animals who live there. It is also a cry against the damaging impacts of human activity and the threat of climate change. The poems follow a long tradition, evoking moody moors and dramatic crags that stretches back to Ted Hughes and Peter Riley, and more recently to the writing of Helen Mort’s evocation of gritstone, and Clare Shaw’s love of bogs as special, magical places.
The poems are accompanied by images from four talented photographic artists. These images are emotional responses to the poetry, beyond mere illustration, they serve to immerse the reader in what Canning calls the ‘glimmering.’
“The poems are carefully-observed, heartfelt moments of connection with the living world.” Yvonne Reddick, author of Burning Season.
“There’s an eerie stillness to these poems, like a first glance at moorland. But beneath their lyrical calm, they bristle with life and struggle; there’s a wind that blows through them, haunting the reader with the landscape’s past, present and future”. Katie Hale, author of The Edge of Solitude
David Canning's poems marvel with bright detail … He knows you can never really leave the contemporary world behind as you walk into wilderness and nor should you — so there is a sense of reflection and urgency here. Richard Price, author of Late Gifts