"The name is Wonderful Woody and to love I hold the key
and I'm offering you to take a stroll through my little world of tranquility."
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Welcome to the Book of Love by Woodward Jones Trafford Publishing
book review by Wendy Strain
A collection of rhyming verse dedicated to the topic of romantic love, this book explores the trials and triumphs of young love. From the grief of betrayal to the blush of new love, the isolation of a broken heart to the joy of healing, the poems within the collection follow the path of a relationship between two people as it grows and sometimes fades away. The poems express the loneliness of separation and the doubt of maturing love, the euphoria of being together and the bliss of reliving moments in time. Scattered throughout are also poems to other ladies—moms, sisters, daughters—all expressions of different forms of love.
The book is presented in notebook size with hand-lettering rather than typed text. At times, this lettering can be difficult to read, but context makes it possible to determine unclear, misused, or misspelled words. While this presentation style is very effective in capturing the sense of young love and early romance, it may not appeal to all readers, particularly when attempting to find poems in the somewhat unstable table of contents and trying to find page numbers, which are softly hand-lettered at the top right of each page.
Several of the poems offer a very melodic meter to them, but the difficulty of trying to rhyme each line pushes the author to make some awkward connections, breaking the meter, and extending one line of a couplet well beyond its mate. Some of the poems read more as personal letters to the object of desire, revealing reactions to specific life-events and touching in their expression of intimate emotion.