Joan Dobbie

The Language of Stone Joan Dobbie

Joan Dobbie began writing her "stone poems" in 1997 when the late Irish poet, Noelle Vial, conducting a Eugene Oregon poetry workshop, gave "Stone/Isolation"(verbally: "stone-slash-isolation") as a writing prompt. This triggered something like a geyser of "stone poems" that kept leaping out of Joan's brain into her computer where they rumbled and roiled for a couple of decades to finally burst out through some long brewing fault in her psyche into this book. These myth-like poems hone in on various facets of life in a troubled relationship through the sharp, unbending, spotlight of stone. Some of the poems are actually funny, some utterly serious. Some have a kind of twisted fairytale quality. All strike deep. In their wake, a reader might never see either "stone" or "isolation" or in fact much of anything else in quite the same way.