The Cure Is a Forest probes the various processes of growth and transformation among all living things in deep ecology. An element of animism permeates throughout the poems which are set in and against the backdrop of Canada's ecotones, greenwoods, and lakes. The Cure Is a Forest is an odyssey or escape from the city and industry into both the past and the possible. A journey of introspection and awakening, where life and death, the numinous and the mundane, and dream and reality are subtly interchangeable, and where often the intricate and impalpable levels of the human and animal spirit and psyche are entwined and illumed.

Desi Di Nardo's profile page

Desi Di Nardo has had numerous publications in North American and international journals and anthologies. Her work has been performed at the National Arts Centre, featured on Toronto's transit system, and displayed in the Official Residences of Canada. Her first book of poetry, The Plural of Some Things, was published by Guernica Editions in 2008.

Desi Di Nardo's poems celebrate the essential dialectic of Nature personified, and romanticized. Di Nardo, however, is no mere nature poet, for there is a sublime metaphysic evident. Her poetry has the same introspection as Gwendolyn MacEwen's - to seek out interior worlds through lakes and other means of transport. For what is the poet-taster to think of her expiring 'frogs with fanny packs and frontal pouches' which are too damned human, if we are mindful of the wheel of life, death and renewal. There is a vibrant indwelling theology in the making of these poems, directing us to the royal jelly of life: 'The soft-spoken take nectar with their tongues/darting in and out of the interior of flowers.' -- Joe Rosenblatt This poetry manages to be exceptionally fresh, moving and very personal in its treatment of sentiments and emotions. There are lots of delightful vignettes and lovely gems; I read, for instance, Nothing is said of our trodden thoughts/expect nothing on the far-off walk/except for the long and lone way out/for us and us alone. These poems should appeal not only to poetry readers, but to those who desire a deeper view of the life of human beings confronted with the infinite aspects of nature. -- Pierre DesRuisseaux, Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate