Wade Walker’s new poetry collection Dead Love: Apocalyptic Pop Sonnets is a fascinating addition to Walker’s previous works, his two books of Gothic espionage Bite of the Wolf and Operation Frankenstein and the Halloween special novelette Night of the Pumpkin Man. Walker describes this lyrical collection as “gothic electro-rotic poems where romance and ruin are inseparable.”
While published in book form as poems, many of the pieces are really songs inspired by pop and other music forms. Other pieces resemble incantations with repeated choruses. Walker has written these poems over a lifetime from his teenage years to current middle age so they reflect a wide variety of experiences from young to mature love.
While the title references love that is dead, evoking the images of graveyards and corpses, and many of the poems fit that atmospheric context, other poems use the dead love metaphor to describe love that is lost, love that is broken, and unrequited love. Overall, it’s a varied, eerie, and striking collection of mixed humor, sadness, grief, and gruesomeness.
And on top of all that, it is groundbreaking for introducing the first-ever instrumental poem. Set toward the end of the collection, the poem serves as a nice interlude or even climax before the final poems. Titled “Instrumental,” and given that it has no words, it features a blank page. However, if you listen closely, I’ll bet you can hear its ghostly symphonic melodies.
As a lover of language, I especially enjoyed Walker’s whacky wordplay. (It’s really not whacky but quite clever—I just thought Walker’s whacky wordplay sounded cool.) A fine wordplay example comes in “There Will Be Love Tonight”:
Like a beast in the night,
I howl with delight.
Necromancer, neck-romancing you,
Who but Walker would think to twist a necromancer into someone necking?
Other examples are “Whore d’oeuvres” and “Ouija Bored.” The latter is the title of a poem in which the narrator declares:
I’ve not yet begun to become
As horrible as I will be –
I’m your October man.
It is worth noting here, as Walker makes clear in his introduction, that we cannot assume the poems’ narrator(s) is the author. Rather, the narrator is a fictional character himself. Walker makes that clear since he really isn’t into necrophilia beyond the literary kind. In fact, I know him personally as a very nice guy—with a dark side, of course.
That said, with Walker’s permission, I cannot resist quoting in full my favorite poem in the collection which is fragrant with necrophilia:
Undying Is an Art
I’ll claw my way up through this dirt,
Six feet and rising through this earth.
Now I’ve broken free of my tomb,
And here I stand within your room.
I come before you as your corpse groom,
To embrace you under the blood moon.
Your breath catches, but you do not run,
You knew this night would surely come.
You lit the candle, spoke the vow,
And I am what you summoned now,
Though cold my touch, my love burns hot,
Flee my reach, you say, “Touch me not.”
Still I drag you to my plot,
Into the soil, love forever forgot.
Back to my grave, where we both can rot.
While Gothic atmosphere pervades the poems, melancholy is also celebrated or at least indulged. I was particularly struck by these lines from “Nowhere Near”:
I awoke from a dream thinking it was 1999,
Then found myself caught in the cobweb of time.
Far from everything being fine,
Everyone’s dead and I’m alone,
A living ghost in my own home.
I can relate to those lines since as I become older and lose family members and friends, I begin to feel myself alone, like a ghost from the past.
Whether you like a little gravity or gruesomeness in your poetry, or you enjoy clever song lyrics, you are bound to find a poem in Dead Love you’ll want to embrace and take to the grave with you.
For more information about Dead Love and Wade Walker in all his Gothic glory, visit www.CodeNameLoneWolf.com.
____________________________________
Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and The Mysteries of Marquette: A Novel, plus many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.
The Gothic Wanderer