`I like understatement - it must be my Northern upbringing," says Donegal-born poet Moya Cannon. Her newly published second collection of poetry, The Parchment Boat, contains the subtly evoked passion and meditative restraint that was distinctive in Oar (1990), her first collection. "In today's soundbyte culture when people are assailed by stimulation all the time, they become sated. To get their attention, you have two options: either by using shock tactics, or through understatement. I prefer the latter. You have to take the risk of speaking quietly at times," she explains.

Winter Paths, a poem in her new book, seems to illustrate this point, dwelling on the fact that a hidden path reveals itself only in the austere quietude of winter, when the greenery has died back: "There is something about winter/ which pares all living things down to their essentials / a bare tree,/ a black hedge,/ hold their own stark thrones in our hearts." The title of her new book sums up this theme of hidden strength in the image of the parchment boat she sees in a museum in Canada: "The original currachs were covered in hide, and so were the kayaks of the Arctic. I was intrigued to think that the kayak could negotiate seas in the 19th century that the Titanic couldn't. The most vulnerable of boats was the hardiest." The "skin" boat is just one of the many objects Cannon finds from the landscape and the natural world that operate as metaphors for human suffering, exultation and endurance. Others range from oysters to an arctic tern's egg and a cache of broken crockery dug up in her garden: "I love the way things resonate with each other. It is miraculous the way metaphor works. You realise how the world is tied together in mysterious ways and is not a mere construct."

Cannon is 41 and started writing poetry about 20 years ago: "I was always interested in poetry, and then I went through a bleak phase and started to write myself out of it." Much of her work is informed by the idea that suffering can be redemptive: "Perhaps it is we who wait in thickets/ for fate to find us/ and break us between its teeth/ before we can start to know anything" (from "Hazelnuts"). She explains: "We're fed this ridiculous ethos by the media that bliss is within our grasp if we could just get ourselves together and go out and get it. But every religion since the beginning of time has hinted that it is absolutely otherwise, that life isn't easy for anybody, but there are wonderful moments in it."

Her poems often revolve around such moments, such "illuminations", which take place outside any codified philosophy or religious doctrine and can be granted at any time, in any context, from the sanctity which a salvaged votive lamp can bestow on "my life's bric-a-brac" to the miracle of mother's milk, which flows, like kindness, without "propriety", but simply in response to need. Nature, whether showing its wolfish winds or delicate nests full of eggs, is the frequent provider of these epiphanies, rather than any elaborately built house of worship. She is ever conscious, however, that the meaning we find in the world around us is always our own projection. "Stars" describes with fond wryness how we have done this with the night sky: "our windy, untidy loft/ where old people had flung up old junk/ they'd thought might come in handy,/ ploughs, ladles, bears, lions, a clatter of heroes . . ."

Some of Cannon's poems express her frustration with the limits of words as adequate working tools: "Have I stooped so low as to lyricise about heather,/adjusting my love/to fit elegantly/ within the terms of disinterested discourse?" (from "Hills"). Her concern with language, its origins, possibilities and diversity, began in childhood. She grew up in Dunfanaghy, in north-west Donegal - "a village at the neck of the second last peninsula" - one of a family of six children. Her father was a schoolteacher and the family spoke Irish at home. The area was English-speaking, and many of her neighbours were of Scots planter stock: "The English spoken by some of our neighbours included archaic Scots words, caught in amber. Then there was the Irish we spoke at home, and the English spoken by my mother, who was from Tyrone. I'm interested in the complexities of the weave of language you get in country areas still."

An enthusiastic "amateur archaeologist" with an MA in history from Cambridge, she frequently uses images which suggest digging through layers of the past for finds: "I'm fascinated by the layering of human, and indeed, non-human experience evident in the landscape. That was the first imagery available to me when I started to write." At a recent reading in Waterstone's, she described herself as a failed musician, and poems such as "Between The Jigs And The Reels" express a desire for poetry to attain the same level of music, which is, she argues, a better medium for communicating "the heart's moods": "Because what matters to us most/ can seldom be told in words/ the heart's moods are better charted/ in its own language/ the rhythm of Cooley's accordion/ which could open the heart of a stone . . ." She has always loved traditional Irish music, and plays the concertina "a little": "I love music as much as I love poetry. A lot of my writing is informed by music and I think cadence is very important. A poem communicates as much by its music as by its rational content." Several of her poems have been set to music by composers Jane O'Leary, Philip Martin and Ellen Crannitch.

She reads widely and cites Rainier Maria Rilke as a central influence: "He is one of the huge figures in modern poetry. There is soul in his writing, a willingness to explore corners of the heart and spirit and take risks in that." As a child, she had the example of her father, who wrote poetry in Irish; and a friend of her mother's, the poet Alice Milligan, who wrote poems about Irish legends and mythology: "There was certainly a feeling that poetry was important in our family."

She now works as a teacher in St Brigid's School for teenage travellers in Galway, her home of many years: "Teaching is wonderful on a day it goes well. Our students follow the Junior Cert elementary programme, and the emphasis is very much to confirm them in their own identity, to give them the tools of literacy to be more in control of their lives." The publication of Oar (which won the Brendan Behan Award) gave her a new sense of fulfilment, however - very different from teaching: "It was satisfying to have finished a product. Teaching is frustrating in one way, because you are never finished."

Meanwhile, she continues her digging: "Is there no end/ to what can be dug up/ out of the mud of a riverbank/ no end/ to what can be dug up/ out of the floodplains or a language?" She concludes: "I used to think poetry happened at the point where the head and the heart sing together. Now I'm inclined to think that poetry is there to nourish the human spirit, whatever that is."

The Parchment Boat is published by Gal- lery Press at £11.95 (hardback) and £5.95. (paperback).