David W Canafax - Poet
"A poem is never finished, never final or complete. It is the form of a boulder, ever changed by wind, rain and perspective, mutable like the heart"
Can You Not Hear Them?
Years mount like the books accumulated on the shelf,
Each with its gladness or tragedy, its own unique existence
To remember in the quiet evening hour before the sun has set;
They mount and remain immoveable, heavy with labor,
They smell of good accomplishments or ill intentions,
Of things done and those which have gone undone.
And in that hour, whose time has been so apportioned
To allow the light and darkness to blend, opens a plane
Transversing sky, earth and time and that place where
Our psyche once dwelt, where it longs to be, where alone
It may find its place, secure from all that intrudes into
The mind and heart and restless, uneasy dream.
There blow the winds of ancient kingdoms, the autumn rain
Of nights upon the obscure roads of unknown lands;
And there spread the low dark skies, the canopy above the hills
Upon which the hosts of dreams, the thrilling unknown shadows,
Stamp in their iron harness and surge forth in one great charge
Against all that is not real. Can you not hear them?
A Glimpse Into
A rotating set of selected poems that reveal the range of David’s craft — each chosen to show a different angle of his thought, his imagery, and his unmistakable voice.
Current Titles
Ionian Conversations / The Road and the Reckoning
This book brings together the first two volumes of David W. Canafax’s poetry into a single introductory collection. Volume I, Ionian Conversations and Other Poems, is the compilation David assembled in 1989, drawing from the poems he had written over the first decades of his creative life. Volume II, The Road and the Reckoning, extends beyond that gathering, collecting additional work from across his career — including earlier pieces and later poems that deepen and broaden the arc of his voice.
Together, these two volumes present more than 300 poems spanning five decades of writing.
This edition is prepared and published to make David’s work available to new readers and to ensure that his poetry can be read, shared, and discovered by wider audiences. David’s Selected Poems is available in paperback and as an EPUB ebook through Lulu. A Kindle edition will also be available on Amazon, with a link added here when it is released.
Upcoming Titles
Future works are planned
“Always struggling to beat out of words what is in the mind-heart, always hammering the heart-head for a phrase, a sentence, a simple word, to describe — no, convey — what is a perpetual extending of one’s self which is life. It may not be attainable, this struggling attempt, but oft it is rewarded by the juxtaposition of words that somehow, in an instant, sparkle and give rise to that fundamental emotion of the soul, which echoes back to the poet & says “yes, that is it, yes, that is it.”
David W. Canafax
