A Confederacy of Joy

SIENA PRESS is proud and excited to announce the release of the début collection of poetry by author Juan-Paolo Perre entitled A Confederacy of Joy which is the 2014 official selection of Siena Press inaugural LEGACY POETRY PRIZE Series designed to highlight significant contributions to poetry whether it be by new or established poets; the sole criteria being works of substantial promise and enduring quality. A Confederacy of Joy is like an intimate journey of the soul through the landscape of the body - Whitman-esque - an auspicious introduction of promise. Echoing the haunting specter of Federico García Lorcas duende this auspicious debut collection hums of a humane music with themes both personal and universal. These are the poems of a soul seeking and of one searching. They are the poems of the prodigal - who journeys out eager into the world and returns having found it once again in shades bucolic melancholic and buoyant. One can clearly see in these poems his ancestral bloodline: from Pablo Neruda to Hart Crane and Walt Whitman to Philip Levine. These poems clamour with a sure and pervasive vision. In fact these are in their purest essence love poems: sometimes solemn as prayers and more often than not rhapsodic; the love of words of place of persons past and present and a love for and of a world which seems always in a miraculous flux between the sacred and profane. Like incantations or the lingering lyric of a departed balladeer they are the poems written by a new type of visionary - one that sees the world but then dares to step back into it - taking his place once again but now militantly hopeful and armed with a certain kind of impenitent joy.