Please Hold (Paperback or Softback)

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.


“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