Starting
to get cold here in Wellington. The Southerly winds are bitterly swept
forward by 120-30 kilometer-an-hour winds. Tonight is quiet after a
stormy couple of days, perfect for a quick blog post. 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
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.
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 . . .
