A Confederacy of Joy oleh Juan-Paolo Perre

Juan-Paolo Perre is the 2014 Legacy Poetry Series Award selected author. Evoking the haunting spectre of Federico García Lorca’s duende, this auspicious debut collection hums of a humane music with themes both personal and universal. These are the poems of a soul seeking and of one searching. They are the poems of the prodigal - who journeys out eager into the world and returns having found it once again in shades bucolic, melancholic and buoyant.

One can clearly see in these poems his ancestral bloodline: from Pablo Neruda to Hart Crane and Walt Whitman to Philip Levine. These poems clamour with a sure and pervasive vision.

In fact, these are, in their purest essence, love poems: sometimes solemn as prayers and more often than not, rhapsodic; the love of words, of place, of persons past and present and a love for and of a world which seems always in a miraculous flux between the sacred and profane.

Like incantations or the lingering lyric of a departed balladeer, they are the poems written by a new type of visionary - one that sees the world but then dares to step back into it - taking his place once again but now militantly hopeful and armed with a certain kind of impenitent joy.