FOMITE
Photo: Susan Van Haitsma
I have a big TV for streaming.
Another documentary on sacred whereabouts.
The wounded, working heart – the most
holy site I know. Its beats. Its battered truths
I try to attend, decipher, hold.
The woes of the world and of an individual life, the bounteous, raucous, overwhelming beauty of being alive — all of it, including the struggle to believe, is the subject of the poems in Dave Cavanagh’s sixth collection, Please Hold. Sadness and uncertainty walk side by side with joy and humor. These poems acknowledge their own limits but manage to emerge with the belief that the irritating phone message we all hear too often, “Please hold,” may also be an enjoinder to hang on for the connection to life and each other.
Praise for Dave Cavanagh’s poetry
“David Cavanagh’s poems are of a fierce quietude. His is the voice of a poet who knows that time doesn’t remove possibilities from our lives, it refines what we are. Listen: these are poems of the pure voice that’s left to us to leave behind.”
—Richard Harrison, author of On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood
About the Author
Dave Cavanagh is an American/Canadian transplanted to Vermont from Montreal by way of Ontario. He feels blessed to have landed in fertile soil. His ancestors immigrated to Canada from Ireland in the late 1820s. His parents worked their way out of poverty in post-World War II Montreal. In elementary and high school, most of Dave’s classmates were recent immigrants from various parts of Europe, especially Italy. Only later did he realize how formative and broadening that experience was for him. He feels privileged to find his nationality defined less by borders than by his relationships —with family, friends, language, history, and the physical world. He has no answer for those who consider his passion for cycling to be obsessive. He just pedals away.
Please Hold is Dave’s sixth book of poems. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. He has taught literature, writing, and interdisciplinary studies at colleges in Vermont and Ontario. For many years Dave was an associate dean and co-director of an award-winning bachelor’s program for non-traditional learners at Johnson State College (now Vermont State University - Johnson). He lives in Burlington with his partner, the visual artist and poet Sharon Webster.
