Patrick Cahill
Patrick Cahill
Patrick Cahill’s prose and poems have appeared in over forty journals, including TriQuarterly, Volt, Poets Eleven, the Irish magazine Into the Void, Subprimal, and Eclectica. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. He is a cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal and was a contributing editor for the Sonoma County anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots. Patrick received his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Portions of this work have appeared in The Daguerreian Annual and Left Curve.
Patrick grew up in South Dakota and western Washington, and his memories of those places often crop up in his work. The natural world of insects and other animals is featured in his yet-unpublished collection of children’s verse.
The Machinery of Sleep
Patrick Cahill’s compressed, imagistic verse in The Machinery of Sleep offers the reader an Objectivist’s eye (keen, but, with Cahill, never cold) and jazz-infused prose poems that demand attention and command respect. He speaks of “There where the story and desire begin,” reaching toward the ineffable and consistently arriving there—from an astonishingly beautiful poem to his young son, to another articulating the very mysteries of childhood (“The dragon in the house he dreams / remembers the language even the child / crossing this field / no longer knows, / though he sang it once.”), to postmodern near-surrealist riffs that keep the reader’s synapses firing. This book holds you in its grip and seems to take you apart, to deconstruct you word by word, image by image, in poems that are unexpected, sometimes unsettling, and always deeply energizing.
If we are the forest the animals dream
The poems in Patrick Cahill’s If we are the forest the animals dream delight in their invention, at times enigmatic and surreal, at times brimming with longing and absence, always penetrating in their precision and astonishing in their turns of phrase. The iconic image of a footbridge in Mexico with which the collection opens establishes a motif these poems revolve around: the liminal realms we traverse alone from mystery to mystery. Other poems seek reconnection in nature and the animals of the title, in music, and in the landscapes and myths of the American West. Ultimately, this is a collection about language, the bridge with which we suture the fragments of our experience and our world.
Reviews
In [If we are the forest the animals dream], Patrick Cahill surprises us with startlingly delicate poems of memory and retrieval. A master of the surreal, he specializes in images that defy physical boundaries. Despite his attention to the metaphysical, this is an astoundingly sensual poetry, an exploration of distant and familiar places, of music and exotic flavors, of longing and loss. But it is also replete with mystery, with an undercurrent of the menace hidden inside our everyday sensations. This book is a perfect marriage of the physical and the transcendent. Wallace Stevens said, ‘The poet is the priest of the invisible.’ With this in mind, we can read Patrick Cahill’s If we are the forest the animals dream as a new liturgy.” — Jeanne Wagner, author of One Needful Song
If we are the forest the animals dream conjures an ethereal path through landscapes, monuments, and memories. These spare lyrics vibrate with absences. Peripheral ghosts haunt the poet’s gaze: ‘the just invisible pattern / a shotgun leaves in the air’ and ‘Wings that make visible the wind.’ Vivid fragments of imagery and elegy appear in stark relief against what isn’t there. These poems remind me of looking up at a forest canopy, the way the crowns of trees don’t touch, leaving channels of light between them. Each line is etched like a leaf against the sky. And like an illusionist, Patrick Cahill is able to craft those in-between spaces into momentary apparitions of love and loss, longing and time, as exquisite and transitory as our lives.” — Erin Rodoni, And If the Woods Carry You
Enter Patrick Cahill’s The Machinery of Sleep and you enter a marvel of a world consumed by dreams, memories, deep observation, love, death, and more. With great artistry, sometimes sharp-edged, sometimes extraordinarily tender, Cahill brings us poems of astonishing range: wise and poignant, heartbreaking, life-affirming, and sometimes humorous. He is a master of marrying emotion with craft not one word is wasted, not one more word is required. The Machinery of Sleep is a collection that will hold you from the first line until the last, for there is so much richness here, so much brilliance end to end and back again. —Katherine Hastings, author of Shakespeare & Stein Walk into a Bar
It did not take me long to be drawn into [The Machinery of Sleep], to read and re-read the poems, to feel their weight. Throughout, we perceive Patrick Cahill’s musicality tinged with darkness, as in “the passage” (“hidden selves and memory’s loss leaves unfolded tiny / green eyeless birds consuming the trees’ branches”). Reminiscent of the work of China Miéville, The Machinery of Sleep creates an expertly woven speculative reality and draws us into it, poem by poem. —Laura LeHew, author of Becoming and Willingly Would I Burn