✒️ Three Selections from Emerging Leitrim Voice C. Day
Leitrim Books is pleased to feature three selections from a developing local poet, C. Day. Day’s poetry moves between outward simplicity and inward intensity, often using clear, accessible language to explore subjects that are anything but simple. His work returns repeatedly to questions of mortality, identity, and the uneasy relationship between the physical body and the imagination that inhabits it.
- “After Death“: Here, the speaker is strikingly resistant to consolation, presenting death not as transformation or transcendence, but as something physical, definite, and unromantic.
- “The cutout bird“: In this piece, the inner life becomes both vital and fragile, imagined as something alive within the self yet subject to scrutiny, removal, or loss.
- “Daffodils“: Against these darker meditations, this poem turns toward nature and memory, but even here beauty is inseparable from decay, renewal, and the persistent cycles that shape both landscape and thought.
Though Day prefers to let his writing speak for itself, maintaining a quiet and anonymous presence off the page, his creative output is significant. The three featured pieces offer just a glimpse into his broader portfolio; they are drawn from his unpublished manuscript, The Collected Poems, which contains over a hundred original works. Currently, Day is expanding his literary repertoire and is actively at work on a collection of short stories.
While we wait for those future works to arrive, the verses featured today serve as a powerful introduction to his voice. Whether looking inward at the fragile self or outward at the natural world, Day rarely offers comfortable resolutions. Instead, these verses require the reader to sit with the uncomfortable realities of the human condition. Readers encountering C. Day’s work for the first time may find it contemplative, sometimes unsettling, but grounded in a consistent search for what it means to live inside a mind that cannot separate wonder from impermanence.