In her latest collection of poems Jo Slade continues her
investigation of displacement and difference and illustrates how these
experiences can be transformed through poetry, a transformation that is
not so much redemptive, as prophetic. These are inquisitive, sonorous,
intense poems that draw us into a world where actuality and dream
collide, where loneliness, grief and resilience are innate. Informed by
history and personal memory, Jo Slade propels us forward, from the title
poem, Cycles and Lost Monkeys,
with its dark specter of surveillance, to the final section where we
are confronted by the consequences of indifference to authoritarianism.
As the judges of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize 2014 commented in their citation regarding Jo Slade?s winning collection The Painter?s House (Salmon
Poetry, 2013), ?spareness, together with a painter?s ability to step
back from the canvas, to detach, to allow light to fall on the object,
is one of the great strengths of her work.There is grief here, and there
is fortitude. The world in these poems is often edged with mystery, the
unknowable, but the poems enact, over and over again, a sureness that
we belong in this world.?