The Blue Light of Dawn

"Sometimes it's one's duty simply to call attention to the special beauty that's 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 its " 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 isn't 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, Distinguished Poet-Judge, Bordighera Prize, 2011-2012