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.
Patrick Cahill's The Machinery of Sleep (Sixteen Rivers Press) appeared in 2020. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. A cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco-based literary and arts journal, he was also a contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County (WordTemple Press). He received his PhD in the 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. Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.
"In his new book, 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
