Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle
by Eddie Woods
review by Mark McCawley
Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle by Eddie Woods
Barncott Press, Kindle Edition, 2012
Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B006TM8UDC, 51pp
Tsunami of Love CD
Amsterdam, Ins and Outs Press, 2007
ISBN/EAN: 978-90-70460-09-9
In the preface to Eddie Woods’ 2011 Barncott Press Kindle edition eBook, Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle, Glasgow writer/anthologist J.N. Reilly says: “I cannot think of a poem similar to ‘Tsunami of Love.’ I doubt there is one; a gaping wound cauterized with such honesty.”
There is, however, one other poetry collection that immediately comes to mind. It’s been thirty-five years since I first read Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man and Eddie Woods’ Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle is the first cycle of poetry since that time that matches Cohen’s collection in terms of the demise of modern love, common-law marriage, sexual desire, and sexual obsession. Both poets deconstruct, reconstruct, criticize, explicate their long, passionate, sexual affairs. Both are by turns tender, despairing, sarcastic, erotic, self-loathing, prosaic and ultimately sublime in their depictions of intense love gone awry. As collections, each certainly does uniquely compliment the other. I cannot think of one without thinking of the other. Indeed, in the annals of poetry and world literature, I know of few collections so closely and intimately related. A connection deserving of further study.
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