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 Alberta 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
