Editor's Note
Kevin Cahill’s poems are ways to think of the apostrophe. They are addresses to ideas that are abstract, absent, as-yet unformed, and intangible. In these poems, abstraction and absence also has to do with nature as a disappearing entity which demands naming even though names are ‘half-true’, and ‘flickering labels’.
Every writer knows the risk of reducing an addressee to the position of an object. But Cahill resolves this issue by making the grass sing, by imagining what a flower can be read as, by leaving unanswered whether flowers and trees can cry in the rain. The poet imbues each object with a subjectivity of its own, so that abstraction and absence can be read as acts, rather than a passive state of being.
Cahill not only writes ‘about’ nature, but inserts a human ‘I’ in the language of nature. Phrases like ‘through the umbilicus that has made my mind / fizzy with pollen tonight, the same blackness is drawn’ suggest an ‘I’ that merges with the elemental, and becomes a meditation on its own self. This is Cahill’s ‘nature poetry’, one that addresses an entity not only to bring it into the world of the poem, but to try and imagine the world of the other.
— Devanshi Khetarpal
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Naming the Flowers
Looking out through the flap of the tent,
these flickering labels catch my attention
with their intimate pet-names:
Primrose Peerless, April Beauty, Loving Couple.
The names disclose the privileged ways
of the tended flower: terms so upright
you wonder if they stand on a bed of silk
and truffles, rather than potash and leaf-mould.
I begin to wonder if the truth in every name
is only half-true. Take Kevin, for example:
the fair-faced, the comely, the gentle one,
propped on an elbow now in the small hours,
obsessed with all the other virtues.
Under a raindrop, the flowers’ luminous bodies
adopt the poses that the gardener has seen,
though, through the umbilicus that has made my mind
fizzy with pollen tonight, the same blackness is drawn.
I try to imagine what the bestower of names
would scribble on the labels now if his own listless,
chill-lipped member was used for something more
than feeding clear streams of excreta into the grass.
That is, if he was here in the dark unofficially,
head right down to where
the flower puts one petal, then another
on his knee, the others around an earthworm,
as if, gross survivors of a purge, they dance
like a group of totems: Be for us, they chant,
the last snake in Ireland.
Venus’-Chariot-Drawn-by-Two-Doves (Aconitum Napellus)
Looking at this bit of Venus on the road
out of Lisnagat, near Knockainey,
her collar-bone-length hair spilling
over my hand, I feel as if this flower
can be read as a piece of the great Good of things
casting its history on me.
History or future? Maybe it’s a carrot
dangling in front of this jackass’ muzzle,
leading him into the future
where there are the flowers, and the trees,
tons of them, in the rain, no one knowing
if they’re still crying.
Sláinte
We drink and laugh in the grass,
picnic with musical instruments,
with fruit, cheese, and wine,
and take the grass on the journey with us.
We hear it practising the song we play
on the mouth-organ and now,
to our song, the grass belongs.
If it is the song that sprayed
from the violins on the Titanic,
it is the same song the grass
now has in its mouth.
Grass, even if we were to rise up
and dance for you
at the end of a rope,
you would have no other song
on your lips. You are engrossed by it.
Still, you sing, love, your lips,
fill me with the sea, fill me
with the sea till I’m sick.
Author | KEVIN CAHILL
KEVIN CAHILL is a poet from Ireland. His work has featured in literary magazines on several continents. Publications include The Banshee Literary Magazine, The New Statesman, Channel Magazine, Quadrant, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, and Southword. He is the recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary Award for 2024/5.