The Cook and the Cold: Collected Narrative Verse

The story is as old as man. Older, if you believe it came first, and us afterwards. And oldest of all storys incarnate tongues is poetry. From days when the nomad paid his poet in cattle, to our current electric era and its global reach, poetry has always held the story, and the story holds us.

What then is the man in story? Since the time of Adam, he has been the monster, that which is alienated, that which does not fit. The vampire, the scientists deformed creation, the killer, the cannibal, the dog-man, the corpse of funerals past: all capture some facet of ourselves outside time, and place, and self.

Such is the inheritance of grotesque creatures handed down to us through all folklore and fiction, culminating in Cosmic Poet Simon Poles authoritative collection of narrative verse. Twenty-four poems-as-stories dissecting the monsters in man, and the monsters which live outside us. Twenty-four tales spun in traditional metre and rhyme, for their horrors are as old as the hills, as young as the new bride of spring. Twenty-four tales confronting the legacy of damnation we share, and our own incapacity to fix it.

Story is the medicine, and poetry the strongest antidote of all. For this is where we explore, recount and cope. This is where we rise above, to the supernatural, that which is above our nature, the nature of the monster. This is the greatest story of all, and there we find our home.

Bio

His mind corrupted by childhood exposure to horror movie matinees, but equally enthralled by the atmosphere of old churches, Simon Pole writes cosmic poetry from the location of Kingsville, Ontario. A graduate of Harvard University, Simon has continued his studies of what is hidden in the dark. Writing is also in his blood, being the great-great-grandson of early Canadian poet Susie Drury.