“I received your Tsunami of Love and read it for several days and nights. It hypnotized me. I think it is a work of genius. I’m very sincere about this. You’ve certainly got the gift of gab in the best sense of the term. It’s a rare gift.” (Harold Norse)
Eddie Woods‘ ‘Tsunami of Love: A Poems Cycle’ consists of two long narrative poems, followed by four shorter ones, which taken together tell “the story of the rise and fall of an incredible love affair” (to quote from the blurb). The book was published in 2005 by Ins & Outs Press, which Woods and Jane Harvey have run from Amsterdam since 1980. ‘Tsunami of Love’ is a catharsis in verse, the exorcism of a love that Woods lived to the extreme for six years in Devonshire, England: an intense relationship with a woman that left him emotionally bankrupt when he returned to Amsterdam alone in 2004.
Woods instinctively realised that only by writing a poem could he hope to emerge from the depression he found himself plunged into. “There was no way out of the tunnel but on the wings of song”, is how he phrases it. ‘Tsunami of Love’ is then a descent into pain, anger, unrequited love and a rise from the darkest sea of sorrow to find comfort in poetry itself. ‘… Calvary was a drag / I grow weary of the tomb / Easter comes & goes / but without my resurrection…’ Woods despairs in one poem to then conclude in another: ‘… Only on pyres / of unrestrained sex / all thought burned to ashes / do I truly petition God / The answers resound / in poetry’s creation…’