Latest Review for Corpus Delicit: Selected Poetry by William Cook

Very pleased to have secured another great review from the fine folk at 'The Horror Fiction Review.' Thanks to Christine Morgan (< make sure you check out her website) who gave a fair and insightful review of my latest collection - Corpus Delicti: Selected Poetry.

CORPUS DELICTI by William Cook (2014 James Ward Kirk Publishing / 210 pp / trade paperback)

"Poetry can just be so cool … language in a more freeform, flowing arrangement … imagery and evocation … the sound and rhythm of the words, and even the look of them on the page, as much an element as their meaning. 

It can also be challenging, maddening, baffling, incomprehensible, and weird. Does it have to rhyme? Is it like a song, or not? How does it work? What is it? What does it do? What does it MEAN? Or, for that matter, DOES it mean anything? And so on. Vincenzo Bilof’s introduction to this collection sums up all that better than I can. 

And then you get to William Cook’s collection of poems. Rest assured, this is no slim poetry chapbook. This is a BOOK. Almost 300 pages, something like 140 poems, two decades’ worth of accumulated artistic craftsmanship. 

Don’t go thinking that poetry equals sappy flowery greeting card stuff, either. These are dark jewels, bloodied and moonlit. These are raw nerves, the exposed heart and meat and emotion. These are heinous acts framed in beauty, and beauty wrapped in hideousness.

As to whether they’re romantic – isn’t that one of those big poetry things, after all? – well, it’d depend on who you were trying to romance. I know some people who might seriously go for being courted with such poems. How worrisome that may or may not be, I’ll leave up to your own discretion.  

With so many poems, and blending together in the harmonious threads that they do, it’s pretty well impossible for me to single out any particular few by title. Some, I know I just didn’t ‘get,’ but I figure that’s more on me than on the poems or the poet. 

I found myself uttering “oh wow” and “ooh that’s nice” and various wordless noises of appreciation several times at particularly stunning bits of phrasing, lines that made me just have to pause for a moment or two to reflect, to admire and think and mentally savor the resonance. 

Admittedly, they may not have been the best thing to be reading during a stressful time surrounded by difficulties, depression and drama. Then again, maybe that’s the perfect time. Maybe that’s when they’re most needed."

-Christine Morgan

The Horror Fiction Review, Christine Morgan, Corpus Delicti, Poetry, William Cook, James Ward Kirk Fiction, Review, Vincenzo Bilof

NEW POETRY COLLECTION - CORPUS DELICTI

For those of you who sometimes read this I apologize for my lack of posts/communication lately. Sometimes life gets in the way and I've been quite busy. Since the last post, my new collection of poetry has been published by James Ward Kirk Fiction, a small Independent publisher in the U.S. (Indiana). 

'Corpus Delicti' is a collection spanning two-decades of material, carefully selected and revised (some) with much new material; 290 pages of dark philosophical verse. BE WARNED: my poetry does deal with dark, often taboo, subjects and language - as such, you have been forewarned. Please keep in mind that my poetry tells a story as a fiction more often than not. My poetry expresses my thoughts, and it would be safe to assume that I speak from experience or have some bias towards the words I choose to employ, for they are my thoughts - but like everything, influence pervades, as much as words are shared. 

I have probably said enough already but I'd like to say a big thank you to my readers - I am getting frustrated with social media lately so will endeavor to be more active on the blog/website front with more posts and things of interest. Take care. Here's some other readers talking about 'Corpus Delicti' instead of me for a change [insert wink here]:

Latest Amazon review

5.0 out of 5 stars A Poet's Heart Gives a Strong Pulse to the Poetry  

May 25, 2014 by Anthony Servante

Format: Kindle Edition

Corpus Delicti by William Cook is an extravagant challenge. It is at once an abundant selection of poems on a wide range of topics while it is also individual little gems that captivate the reader. One might say that each poem has its own job, its own vision that leads one to the next poem, and so on. If anything, its greatest feature, its size, is also my one criticism. I see three books here, a trilogy, in one volume. But that's good news for poetry fans: you get three books in one, close to two hundred pages of gems to appreciate one by one. This is not a book to devour in one sitting. It is to be savored slowly, over multiple readings, perhaps three to four poems at a time. I tried random readings and sequential readings, and both work equally fine, with only a subtle difference in reading experience. It is not often that a book of such magnitude of thought and word reaches the modern reader. Purchase Corpus Delicti with confidence that you will have a year's worth of reading joy and introspection. And if you come to read William Cook from his fictional work, then you are in for a treat. Fans of Blood Related can enjoy these little intellectual challenges to the mind in the same way we enjoyed Cook's toying with the line between fiction and nonfiction with his serial killers in Blood Related. The pulse of poetry is as strong as the poet's heart in this very large compilation of poems. 

Anthony Servante wrote this review and I'm very proud to have him take an interest in my work. He is an interesting chap and has a great little blog that is getting bigger by the day - fantastic articles and reviews, profiles, interviews, poetry, fiction and everything dark in-between. He is an academic fellow who has a good eye for the whole process of authorship; either verse, fiction, or non-fiction alike. He has also reviewed another poetry collection, 'Moment of Freedom' with a very insightful and erudite critique of my work:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New Modernism April 1, 2013

By Anthony Servante

Format:Kindle Edition

[Also reviewed in the Servante of Darkness Blog]

William Cook joins the Modernism School of Poetry. From Wiki: "For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world." Thus William combines a writing style of prose and poetry to weave an intellectual tapestry, slipping his words in and out of subjective and objective observations, pulling and pushing the reader to envision the completed tapestry while savoring the in's and out's of the words themselves, much as we watch a movie without thinking about the camera work or actor interpretations of the screenplay. As Peter Gabriel points out in The Cinema Show regarding the use of cosmetics: "Concealing to reveal."

Let's consider the "The edge of the night" from MOMENT OF FREEDOM: Selected Poetry. First off, two notes: the title Moment of Freedom is ironic in that the title indirectly states, a lifetime of slavery to the "moment of freedom", much as the term "a cloudless clim" from Lord Byron, must incorporate "cloud" to denote an empty sky: an image to convey emptiness rather than simply using the unpoetic "empty" to state such. Second, the poem's title capitalizes the article but not the noun or prepositional phrase, combining poetic license with standard grammatical rule (namely "The", the first word in the line, must be capitalized). The intellectualizing has begun; William flaunts the world's rules by obeying them as he pleases, this, a moment of freedom.

To discuss William's deliberate misuse of grammar would be folly as it is part of the pursuit to reach the reader. Note also his use of metaphor and litotes. To say simply: "a corpse" is not in his vocabulary; he metaphorically says "dinner" and the diner, death ("the dead!"). Knowledge is life, and life is accepting death: "The darkness comes from knowing nothing is ours, except death...." The first slip into litotes comes from a shift into prose from the metaphor: "...to wake with a sore splitting back from the cold floor in borrowed clothes and eyes..." and with the "borrowed...eyes" shifts back to poetry and metaphor. These are very aesthetic acrobatics.

Furthermore, in the line "To wake up and see the sun if not the glare from beyond" we see additional shifts with the sun at once literal and figurative (as that solar body we find upon waking and as a metaphor for the afterlife). William maintains the balance between shifts throughout the work and ultimately "time" becomes a "cannibal" eating us as we sleep and wake, with varying degrees of metaphoric intents. Thus, the final line of Part II captures this fatality of cannibalism of the self as William becomes the "I" of the poem and states the thesis with the "if", bringing together the personal and the intellectual in Part III: "The science of the mind corroded the body, blinded every mile I ever burnt in this life and the next if there ever were such a thing."

A work in three parts, "The edge of the night" is representative of the poetry throughout MOMENT OF FREEDOM. Think of the book as a complete poem with each individual poem making up the whole. I do not recommend jumping around reading individual works, but rather beginning to end, as one would read James Joyce's Ulysses or William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. It is a work worthy to be mentioned with these modernist authors.
 

Anyway, that's pretty much the intro to my collection 'Corpus Delicti'/'Moment of Freedom.'  Those of you who buy a copy - bless you and I hope you find it interesting, those of you who don't - I hope you find something else worth reading here on my blog/site. Check out the Links/Recommended pages for other horror, art and writer-related links. Until next time . . .