Dublin By Dusk | Harp Recital and Poetry Reading

Kathleen Loughnane, one of Ireland’s foremost traditional harpers, and Moya Cannon, poet of music, landscape and history, present a very special evening of music and poetry in the NLI’s Joly theatre. 

Kathleen Loughnane has done much to research and bring into the current repertoire of Irish traditional musicians the harp music of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has breathed new life into the compositions of harpers such as the seventeenth century Connellan brothers of Sligo and has also brought to light much of the music of the Patrick O’Neill Collection, one of the treasures of the NLI. 

Some of this material she has recorded with Dordan on 4 CDS and she has also recorded 5 CDS in her own name and accompanying books of her harp arrangements, for all of her CDS. She has recently published a second selection of tunes from the eclectic musical records of the Kilkenny miller, piper and music collector, Patrick O Neill, (1765-1832) and whose fascinating musical notebooks are in the National Library of Ireland’s collections. 

Moya Cannon is a prize-winning poet, whose seventh collection, ‘Bunting’s Honey’ was published by Carcanet Press, Manchester in 2025. Her poems are written out of her enduring preoccupations with history, especially the history of exile and displacement, with music, language and the landscapes and seascapes of our endangered earth.

Her Collected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in 2021.  In her poems, archaeology and geology figure as gateways to an understanding of our relationship with our endangered earth.  Music, particularly traditional Irish music, has always been a deep interest and is a constant theme. She has received the Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award and, in 2011, was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University P.A..  She has edited Poetry Ireland Review and is a member of Aosdána. 

 For more information and to explore the NLI Dublin by Dusk programme, please see here.