Overview

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.'

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Reviews

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

Author Information

Joe Dolce is a composer and poet and an Australian-American dual national. He was a 2021 City of Melbourne Poet Laureate, Highly Commended in the 2020 ACU Poetry Prize, short-listed in 2020 & 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prizes, short-listed in the 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2014 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Poetry Prizes, and awarded First Prize in the 2017 University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize, for his choral libretto, And let the wonder in. His poetry was included in Best Australian Poems 2015 & 2014 and he was winner of the 25th Launceston Poetry Cup (2010).He composed and orchestrated the SATB oratorio, Joan on Fire, which was performed twice by the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and Chorelation choir at the Melbourne Baptist Church. He was on the staff of the Australian Institute of Music, teaching Composition, Setting Poetry to Music, and Ensemble for two years. He is more popularly known, internationally, for writing and performing the song, Shaddap You Face (1980-81) which was the Number One 45 rpm record (when they made 45 rpm records!) on the pop charts in a dozen countries and held the nine-times platinum award for the most successful song in Australian music history, for four decades. To date, Shaddap You Face has been translated into over 10 languages, including Papua New Guinea pidgin and the Western Australian aboriginal Indjibundji dialect.He is co-writer, with his partner, Lin van Hek, of the song Intimacy, which was part of the soundtrack of the sci-fi masterpiece, The Terminator, selected as part of the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry archives.His songs have been recorded, internationally, by scores of artists.In 1981, he was presented with the Advance Australia Award by Sir Rupert James Hamer, AC, KCMG, ED, Premier of Victoria.

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