"Beneath your eyelids a different name sleeps with you"
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A Thousand Windows by Coy Williams Trafford Publishing
book review by JAlpha
A Thousand Windows, by Coy Williams, is an emotionally compelling collection of 73 poems, the majority of which effectively develop the intimacy and immediacy of a second-person narrative point of view...
Returning across the night,
I drift in the smoke
from a thousand candles
of your love,
softly leading me home.
(Excerpt from "The Dream Came Again")
Additionally, Williams inclusion of a public (i.e. universal) "you" throughout most of the poems in A Thousand Windows creates a mysterious and ethereal bond with the reader that is suggestive of an often sited line from a poem titled Windows by French poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821 -1867)... Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window.
And ironically, looking through the enigmatic windows of William's second-person narratives provides readers with a well-crafted structural framework and poetic means to publicly observe the core of his deeply emotional and personal themes of love and loss that feel both transparent and forbidden at the same time.
Absent of the formal poetic elements of rhythm and rhyme—often associated with the themes of romance and beauty in poetry—many of Williams poems within A Thousand Windows, eloquently embrace the traditional tone of an album of love songs infused with vivid depictions of the passage of time and seasons.
Call up the autumn,
in its red
and deepening heart
(Excerpt from "September")
Behind the invisible window of each poem in A Thousand Windows, is a depth of emotions emitting the collective power to leave readers feeling as if they must not turn away, less they lose their "window" of opportunity to interact with something intimately distant—unknown—and yet infinitely familiar.