"Jo Slade's second collection, The Vigilant One, has the same sure magic as its predecessor, In Fields I Hear Them Sing (Salmon, 1989). The images strike deep, like deft brush strokes, as poet/painter Jo Slade takes us through light and shade, nuance, subtlety of tone, passion of colour. As Tom Halpin wrote of her first collection, "...A strikingly large proportion of her poems possess the eerie, dramatic qualities of fable and allegory, blending an, at times, other worldly remoteness with a palpable hypnotic change. They read ... as deeply imagined enactments of the ineluctable life and persistence of the spirit; celebrations in fact, of the life of the imagination itself, of its sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disconcerting, transforming power upon the Self."

Jo Slade's poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, in Ireland and abroad, for a number of years. She studied Art & Design at the Limerick and National Colleges of Art and Design and exhibits her paintings widely. She is a member of the Limerick Fourfront Poets group which was formed to work on collaborative poetry. Their Voices and Light was performed at the Belltable Theatre, Limerick and the Alliance Francaise, Dublin. She was one of four editors of an anthology of Limerick writing, On the Counterscarp.

(You can remove it later if you change your mind!)