ISBN 978-1-925263-97-8
EARTH . FIRE . WATER
Jo Dey’s poems in EARTH hint at a harshness to follow -- ‘Scarecrow’ and her anti-refugee imprisonment poems. Even so, these are only hints among sometimes spiritual landscapes. The delicate beauty of the poems ‘Glen Gould’, ‘The Lost Buddhas’, ‘Chinese Garden’ and ‘Yellow Lilies’ tends to calm and soften the reader’s response to harshness in EARTH. It’s entirely appropriate because there’s almost nothing calming or softening about Dey’s poems in FIRE. They’re about murder, male rituals, war, the down and out, aging and dying. It takes nine consoling WATER poems to more or less douse the FIRE. The poet internalises these sights and sounds as well as finding herself at the edge of another galaxy . . . sun, sand, wind, sky, gulls, clouds and both darkness and light from the sea.
Graham Rowlands