The eighty poems in At the Noisy Café, stone-skip acrossthe 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 Albert 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.