The eighty poems in At the Noisy Caf矇, stone-skip across the 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 Caf矇 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 Caf矇 has been published individually in poetry journals in Australia and overseas. This is the first time they have been collected together in one volume.
Joe Dolce is the recipient of the Advance Australia Award, the winner of the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Health Poetry Prize and the 25th Launceston Poetry Cup. He was a 2020 City of Melbourne Poet Laureate and included in Best Australian Poems twice. His songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists internationally. Les Murray AO, recipient of the TS Eliot Award and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry wrote: 'Renowned songwriter Joe Dolce has long outgrown the pop lyric and moved into a risky domain where recitative, comedy, folk and slapstick build shelters for themselves among social commentary and the poetry of lists.'