The Blue Light of Dawn (Bordighera Poetry Prize)

Poetry. Sometimes its ones duty simply to call attention to the special beauty thats there before us but which being preoccupied we so often fail to see. Like noticing the morning sun rising like the golden timepiece it is where a fleeting moment caught in all is fine-cut crystal clarity might be held and sipped like sparkling champagne. This is what Joanne Monte offers us with such rare sensitivity: a flower of great beauty amid the noise and clangor and violence that too often is our daily portion of dirt to eat. How often we have cried out in silence for a language / we cannot speak for the grace of a single moment immortal held still in one shot one frame. And isnt that frame the very image at the heart of Being that we hope to see more clearly the very thing that for our own peace we must salvage out of this rubble of life? William Carlos Williams found this in the world about him and now another New Jersey poet has found it for us as well. Read her. No better meditate on what she has to tell us in such exquisite and tender language. Her poems are like saxifrage the healing flower that breaks the very rock of indifference strewn each morning about us.—Paul Mariani