As you can see at this website, I have five books of poems in print, four published by Salmon Poetry of Ireland and one by Fomite Press in Vermont. The books explore many different themes and use a variety of poetic forms to find their way. In general, through poetry I’m trying to probe what it means to be attentive in this life, the pain and beauty of living with open eyes and heart. 

I've done dozens of popular readings in the U.S. and Canada.  I've also performed poems with musicians such as the poetry-jazz group, PoJazz, and the Celtic band, Wind That Shakes the Barley. My poems have appeared in leading journals and anthologies in Canada, Ireland, the U.S., and the U.K.

A native of Montreal with dual Canadian/American citizenship, I live in Burlington, Vermont. After many years as an associate dean and chair of Interdisciplinary Studies with Johnson State College (now Northern Vermont University), I now write full time.

Hope you enjoy the poems you see here. The books are available through bookstores and online, or by contacting me. Let me know what you think.

Testimonials:

"This is the poetry of a man with an eye for the smallest of things and their tragedy. Or their joy. Or their divinity — and all of the above. I want to write out all the images in this work that changed my own sight, but that would be telling. For the beauty of this writing is the way that Cavanagh lets his readers see each poem’s discovery with the corners of their own eyes. It’s a subtle art, and rare, and through this book’s pervasive figure of the sleepwalker, this is a poet who leads us to understand that, set to words, every poem is the private truth of a dream." 

- Richard Harrison, author of On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood and winner of Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, commenting on The Somnambulist and the Good Life.

“David Cavanagh’s poems straddle birth and death, joy and sadness, health and sickness, youth and age, male and female, seriousness and humour with deft handling astride his own Pegasus.”

- Greg Delanty, author of No More Time, The Ship of Birth, Selected Delanty, and many other books, commenting on Straddle.

"Cavanagh's best poems achieve not only clarity but also a poignancy that derives from simple wisdom expressed with great vividness and grace."

- Benjamin Myers, former poet laureate of Oklahoma, in a review of Straddle in World Literature Today.

“Cavanagh can be funny and doleful at once, or tender and roguish. His syntax can coil, then snap,…”

-Jim Schley, in a review of Straddle in Seven Days.

Selected Anthologies

in which my poems appear:

Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers Press)

So Little Time: Words and Images for a World in Climate Crisis (Green Writers Press)

The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (U. of Notre Dame Press)

The World Engaged: An Anthology of Nature Writing (Wood Thrush Books)

The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (Norton)

The WRUV Reader: a Vermont writers' anthology (University of Vermont)

Even the Daybreak: 35 years of Salmon Poetry (Salmon Publishing)