JANICE DEMPSEY
Remembering the Future
A selection of poems written between 2007 and 2023 by Janice Dempsey
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This collection by Janice Dempsey brings together a selection of the poems she’s been writing since 2007, and editing ever since. Janice is a firm believer that ‘less is more’, so most of these poems are not long. Her aim as a writer is to achieve maximum feeling and resonance using as few words as necessary, while communicating fully with her readers. Her subjects are derived from her own life experience, which she believes will chime with others’ if she writes honestly and without pretending to be ‘a poet’. At the same time she respects and employs the poetic craft she’s learned over the eighteen years since she began to write poetry.
As a trained fine artist, much of Janice’s inspiration is visual and some of the experiences she values come from art works. She also values surprise and humour, so many of her poems take a sideways look at life. She believes that to categorise art and writing too clearly is to undervalue the ambiguity and overlap of emotions that are essantial to life, thought and art. So she allows themes to segue one to another throughout her book: from memories of childhood to observations of nature, to places where she’s travelled and lived, to riffing on quirky thoughts on space travel, to humorous verses based on Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ parodies, then speeding on on to more meditative poems of love and fear of loss and oblivion. ‘Remembering the Future’ has received positive reviews from two poets and many of her readers. Janice values them all. The comments that she most appreciates are David Cooke’s opinion that ‘Dempsey is an unassuming yet quietly authoritative poet who says what she means and means what she says,’ and Adele Ward’s that ‘the variety of forms is matched by widespread journeys through different countries, from Ireland and England to Sofia, Rome and Kathmandu, which Dempsey vividly conjures up and then sprinkles her joie de vivre on each experience.’ Both are themselves publishers, which makes Janice profoundly grateful for their appreciation of her work.
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