At the Noisy Café - by Joe Dolce (Paperback)

About the Book

A collection of poetry from the brilliant poet, musician, and author, Joe Dolce.

Book Synopsis

The eighty poems in At the Noisy Café, stone-skip across the Shakespearean elements of misconception, reason versus emotion, fate and the fantastical, idyllic setting, insult, separation, reconciliation and happy endings.

Song of Nestor is a ninety-line Homeric epic that tells the little-known David-and-Goliath story of St Nestor and the Vandal-giant, Lyaeus. The startlingly original Cavafy Villanelles, depicts, in verse-form, a sequence of ten little known biographical details of the famous Greek poet's life. The Murder of Alberta King and Broad Arrow Café memorialize two traumatic community tragedies. There are lightning-strike flashbacks from the Australian poet's Italian-American Ohio childhood with Kissing grandma, Frozen kittens and the humorous, Miss Ohio dummy, and tender poems of love and heartbreak in I never found those lips again, Aloysius' lament, Daddy plus one and Our loss.

Over the past six years, every poem in At the Noisy Café has been published individually in poetry journals in Australia and overseas.

This is the first time they have been collected together in one volume.

Joe Dolce is the recipient of the Advance Australia Award, the winner of the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Health Poetry Prize and the 25th Launceston Poetry Cup. He was a 2020 City of Melbourne Poet Laureate and included in Best Australian Poems twice. His songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists internationally.

Les Murray AO, recipient of the TS Eliot Award and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry wrote:

'Renowned songwriter Joe Dolce has long outgrown the pop lyric and moved into a risky domain where recitative, comedy, folk and slapstick build shelters for themselves among social commentary and the poetry of lists.'

Review Quotes

Go for it, Joe!

Kris Hemensley, recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award.

I have given your poems a careful reading. I think they are among the best you have written. You handle the villanelle deftly, lightly, appealingly. When I read the first one, The murder of Albert King one that I read some time ago and immediately loved, I thought, what can Joe do to better this? And then I found you bettered it (or at least equalled it) time and again.

Andrew Lansdown, winner of the John Bray National Poetry Award, the Joseph Furphy Poetry Award and twice winner of Western Australian Premier's Book Award.

Enitharmon's bower is a Blakean exploration of innocence and experience in the form of three sonnets touching mortality which reminds us of Milton's eternal question, 'What hath night to do with sleep?' 'This modernist triptych asks how love can be richly endorsed in the works of art.'

Emeritus Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM, Judges Report, ACU Poetry Prize.

Enitharmon's bower was magnificent. Take The tyger with you if there is a flood - it's a great poem. My mother was from Tasmania and my father used to call her the Tasmanian devil. Brush and Eucalyptus - what a rhyme. Thank you for sharing this beautiful and heartrending piece on the loss of Lin's daughter [Our loss]. A year may have passed but it feels in it's freshness as if it is mere hours old. And before that the poem about the Frozen kittens and your hand reaching out towards them. I felt honoured to read both.

Elizabeth Smither, New Zealand Poet Laureate, 2001-2003

Joe Dolce is a true poet in the body of a song and dance man, a soulful entertainer with a knife-blade wit. His fluency and range are dazzling, full of anarchic joy and sorrow. Who else could have written the superb Cavafy villanelles, an act of homage returning the great Greek poet to the noisy café of his life?

David Mason, Poet Laureate of Colorado, 2010-2014

Knife penny - a masterpiece in my view.

Les Murray AO, TS Eliot Prize, Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry