Poem of the Week | July 13, 2026

Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer (Word Works, 2020), winner of the Hilary Tham award; I will not kick my friends, (Elixir, 2018) winner of the Elixir Prize; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, (Elixir, 2012) winner of the Antivenom Prize. Texas Review Press will publish her next collection, Serial Fabulist, in 2027. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Cincinnati Review, Yale Review, Poetry London, The Adroit Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Kathleen was granted fellowships by Maison Dora Maar, Cill Rialaig Project, James Merrill House, the Heinrich Böll Cottage, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship. She lives in Sonoma, California.

“Iveragh” by Kathleen Winter is our Poem of the Week.

***

Iveragh

The sheep are not light.
They’re like custard inside eclairs,
thicker and heavier than expected.
Instead of a stripe of chocolate,
their backs each bear a splash of paint.
Shy, they do what they can to avoid
being eaten. It’s not much.

In the wind they hunker like larger
limestone rocks: redundant, repetitive,
fungible, too small to be boulders,
bereft of language, or so we say.

Of course the sheep know this land
better than we do, having lived here longer.
Before they modeled for Georgian porcelain,
they were a vivid currency for the Church,
the gentry, even the poor.

Like bog-wood and the Irish elk,
their presence preceded language.
When the gatherers arrived,
when they gathered to hunt,
sheep watched from the cliffsides,
their black mouths ceaselessly grinding
like a troubled sleeper almost awake
before the last day’s dawn.

***

Author’s Note

Iveragh is the largest peninsula in southwest Ireland, in County Kerry. The poem is one of the last I wrote for a manuscript associated with Ireland and France. Having a bit of Irish family background led me to do four residencies in the Irish Republic—joyful, fruitful experiences each time. The Irish people’s abiding interest in language and literature, and the island’s spectacular natural worlds, are to me irresistible. Though I’m a shameless gazer at sheep-covered landscapes, in “Iveragh” I aimed for an unsentimental, non-touristic approach. Since my first trip to County Kerry in 2016, I can’t seem to shake the temptation to write about these ubiquitous animals and their surroundings.