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